id.page

Russian Oligarch's True Warning Hidden in Plain Sight

ID.PAGE — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:15:58 +0000

JUL 11, 2026

The Economist published two important pieces centered on Russian “oligarch” Andrey Melnichenko, who is labeled one of Russia’s most ‘enigmatic’ wealth titans despite at times occupying first place amongst Russia’s richest men as, what Economist calls, the world’s “fertilizer king” and Russia’s “biggest industrialist”. He’s presented as particularly unique due to his more “centrist” position as someone who’s both inhabited Putin’s inner circle, yet also spent years living the Westernized liberal and Europhile lifestyle typical to Russian billionaires.

The first piece is a kind of introduction to him, while the second piece is an oped written by him and given tribune on the Economist as a kind of urgent message to the world about Russia.

https://www.economist.com/1843/2026/07/09/a-top-russian-oligarch-breaks-the-silence

The piece is long and filled with some interesting revelations. In its quest to skew the narrative toward the usual “Kremlinology” talking points of oligarchs serving a powerful undemocratic Russian autocrat, the Economist instead inadvertently gives light to contradictory realities. It exposes the fact, for instance, that contrary to the West’s beliefs, oligarchs in Russia had already been without real political power for some time, though the writers would never dare utter the reason why:

When Putin invaded Ukraine, the world waited for Russia’s rich and powerful to speak against the war. But they stayed quiet. The West imposed sanctions on them, partly to make them apply pressure on Putin. But this betrayed a lack of understanding of how power worked in Russia—the business elite had long given up trying to influence politics.

The journal admits that Western sanctions actually did the opposite of their intent, and pushed Russian elite back into the state’s bosom, with Melnichenko—who chose to live in Switzerland for a long portion of his life—himself admitting that for the first time he felt Russia was his only home:

Putin himself was worried the oligarchs would betray him. Instead sanctions pushed them back into his embrace. Yet when they returned, they repatriated their interests and ambitions along with their money. Melnichenko’s opening gambit when our conversations began three months ago was: “For the first time I feel I have no other country but Russia.” Given the reticence of his peers, it is astonishing that Russia’s most enigmatic oligarch, while living in Moscow, is willing to put his head above the parapet and lay his views on the record.

It goes on to even admit that, following the onset of the SMO, the Russian state did in fact begin confiscating oligarchs’ assets and returning them to “loyalists”:

At around that time he and other businessmen realised that the war would not end soon. With no reprieve from sanctions in sight, they started to repatriate themselves back to Russia, where they faced a different kind of threat to their assets.

Property rights in Russia had always been conditional. But the war unleashed a rapacity that hadn’t been seen for decades. Since 2023, assets worth $60bn have been nationalised or handed over to loyalists. It was the biggest redistribution of property since the mass privatisations of the 1990s.

In August 2023 prosecutors sought to confiscate Sibeco, a Siberian power plant, from Melnichenko, arguing that his purchase of it had involved fraudulent collusion with the previous owner. Two weeks later, the prosecutor-general’s office backed down in return for Melnichenko making a donation to a “charitable organisation”. According to people familiar with the settlement, the sum was 32bn roubles ($335m)—the same amount that Melnichenko had originally paid for Sibeco. The charitable organisation was Sirius, a school for gifted children favoured by Putin.

This is important to understand because it highlights this Economist series’ entire underlying thread, which is that the SMO has been slowly revolutionizing Russian society, turning the oligarchs back from liberalized sixth columnists to nation-serving adherents in the manner of China.

Melnichenko was amongst the first and most astute to recognize what must be done. He decided to get back in good favor with his motherland, which he had begun to use merely as a source of extraction and profits while he enjoyed life abroad. He returned and began to ingratiate himself with Russian elites, re-learning the system and re-absorbing the true national ‘pulse on the ground’:

Melnichenko now knew that he needed to establish property rights in Russia. The only way to do this was to work his way into the system, understand the competing interests and help shape its objectives. “If you want a seat at the table, you have to do something.”

As always he began by observation. “In 2023 I started to spend more time in Russia and was getting to know it in a much deeper way.” He talked to anyone who had a stake and a viewpoint: “politicians, journalists, thinkers, liberals, nationalists, communists”. He could be found having breakfast with Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel prizewinner and founding editor of Novaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper, who was ostracised by the government and branded a “foreign agent”. In the evening he might have tea with Alexander Dugin, a nationalist philosopher who glorifies the war.

But here’s where the entire Economist series hinges. In his quest to re-integrate into Russian society, Melnichenko discovered that Russian elites are confounded and lack a unified vision of a workable future, for the time being. He then notes that Russia is seen as standing at a crossroads between four different potentialities, all of which sound grim, and which the Economist uses as the chief centerpiece to hook the series’ narrative on.

But it is a deliberately misleading hook, because they disingenuously present it as Melnichenko’s visions of a collapsing Russia with no options. In reality, Melnichenko presented the four “doom” scenarios in order to really pose his fifth redemptive one.

And what is that? To find out, we must peer into the second piece, written by the man himself:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/07/09/why-a-broken-russia-is-bad-for-the-world

In the piece, he keeps a deliberately neutral language in regard to the Ukrainian conflict, never quite openly blaming Ukraine or Russia, despite rumors he had been outspoken against the Russian SMO in the past. Now he’s clearly treading a fine line, and hoping for resolution which benefits himself, as well as society.

Critically, the theme of his entire piece can be condensed into one word: Sovereignty.

He accuses the West of trying to undermine and sabotage Russian sovereignty, and carefully implies that the broader conflict between Russia and the West revolves around the West’s disintegrating security architectures viewing Russian sovereignty as a threatto them—which is precisely accurate and true.

From his piece:

Russia today possesses sovereignty: it has made and continues to make its decisions independently. This is not an evaluative judgment but a descriptive one. Russia has defined its vital interests, possesses the material base to defend them and bears the consequences of its own decisions.

The current Western discourse on post-war Russia, for all its variation in political packaging, aims at one thing: the destruction of that sovereignty or its radical limitation. The logic is understandable. If Russian sovereignty is perceived as a threat, its elimination seems to solve the problem.

He goes on to pose the four scenarios, though it must be said, he specifically notes these are scenarios being discussed in the West—a stark contradiction to the Economist’s attempted painting of these “harrowing” outcomes as those feared by Russian elites as represented by Melnichenko.

You see, he doesn’t warn of any “looming disaster” facing Russia, but rather paraphrases threats the West itself is scripting, which is an all-too-inconvenient fact for the Economist staff who rather spin it in a more sensational way. It serves their agenda to pretend it’s “Putin’s own oligarchs” who are sounding the alarm of Russia’s “coming collapse”.

The four scenarios Melnichenko gives are:

“A humiliated Russia lingering on the periphery of the West.”
Russia becomes a vassal of China, ending its relationship with the West.
Russia becomes fragmented and falls apart like the USSR.
Russia becomes a “fortress: closed, mobilized, in permanent siege”, and a state of “perpetual emergency.”

As stated, these are Western fantasies, and the ‘Overton window’ of Russia’s future that Western politicians and pundits alike would like us to believe is the only trajectory of Russia’s fate. Melnichenko tacitly disagrees, but cleverly makes sure not to make this too obvious as he’s writing for a Western audience for the purpose of reconciliation.

Melnichenko finally reaches the inescapable conclusion, which is that the very heart of the conflict revolves around the issue of Russian sovereignty, and by ignoring this, the Europeans doom the conflict toward existential escalation:

How Russia conducts its own political process and towards what ends it directs its sovereignty is a question that can be resolved only inside Russia itself, without deference to external preferences. Any attempt to manage this process from outside is not only doomed but counterproductive: it destroys the very condition—sovereignty—without which sustainable peace is impossible in principle. This must be accepted, not out of sympathy for Russia but from the understanding that no alternative to this recognition exists.

He goes on to lay out a rather brilliantly nested exegesis which is a message, and a hidden threat, to the Western order. Like a Matryoshka doll, he conceals this message beneath layers of “openness” that appear ostensibly as calls for understanding and cooperation with the West. In reality, what he’s laying out is his accurate portent for Russia’s future, one where businesses, oligarchs and citizens alike, all work toward a common sovereign revolution. This is sold as being beneficial to the West because, as he foresees things, it creates “predictable” stability—but the real threat is hidden in the message that the West is pushing Russia to become more unified and powerful than ever before.

I have grounds to believe this reckoning will come, and these grounds can only be understood by explaining why it has not come sooner.

Those who built the new Russia—entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, sportsmen, professionals who created its economy, its meaning, its reputation in the world—largely saw themselves as internationalists. This was neither weakness nor naivety. It was the obvious choice in a world where global integration seemed irreversible. Science operated by international standards, technology came from the best sources, rights and obligations were governed by Western law in Western courts, children studied at the world’s best universities, capital was placed where it was protected. This choice meant, consciously or not, the transfer of a significant part of sovereignty to external systems. Not because that was the desire. Because it seemed that the rules were neutral and access was open to all.

After spelling out how the new Russia was built by internationalists, he admits that globalization was a failure because it was nothing more than a ruse to take away Russia’s sovereignty:

For many years Russia’s authorities warned that this was a mistake. The advocates of global integration viewed this as a remnant of Soviet thinking. Time has proved them wrong, not because globalisation did not exist but because it was never neutral.

Sanctions showed this plainly. They were written by some, in the interests of some, and can be revised for others by political decision. My own experience of Western sanctions matters here not as a personal grievance, but as evidence that the infrastructure of globalisation is politically conditional. Assets can be frozen; rights once considered inviolable dissolve the moment a political decision is taken.

The systemic effect of sanctions proved broader than their original intent. Disconnection from global systems—financial, technological, legal, educational—confronted Russia’s creative class with a choice it had not anticipated: either full emigration with the severing of all ties, or a return to the question it had been avoiding for three decades: how to build its own world inside Russia, by its own rules, to its own standards.

He concludes that this process of rebuilding Russia as a self-contained ecosystem, “by its own rules, to its own standards” will not come fast or easy, but it is now fatefully ensured:

This process is neither fast nor easy. But it is inevitable, since the global world in its former sense no longer exists. Those who know how to create find themselves choosing not between Russia and a global space, but between Russia and a fragmented world in which each bloc builds its own rules. Under these conditions, the logic of creation points inward: to build something that will be attractive—to those who left long ago with the dissolved Soviet Union, to those who left recently, and to the Russian-speaking world at large.

Layered even deeper in his admonishment is the prediction that expats and Russian businesses alike—particularly those which may have sold out in the beginning, it is implied—will again eventually find their home in Russia:

Large Russian businesses that invest in a sovereign Russia will, in time, become an integral part of it. The same will hold for other important institutions. As a consequence, Russia itself will become different. If we strive for a sovereignty that creates unity between citizens and institutions, I hope that in time we will correct all the internal imbalances for which we too bear responsibility—through the fact that we were once glad to absent ourselves.

In closing, he argues that such a sovereign, internally coherent, and unified Russia will not please the West, but it will be a far safer option than a Russia destabilized and fractured to the point of dangerous unpredictability:

The attraction of predictability

A sovereign Russia will not make every country comfortable. But it will be more advantageous in the long run than the alternatives. The choice for external players is not between a friendly Russia and a hostile one. It is between a Russia whose behaviour is predictable and one whose trajectory is unknown. In the world taking shape now, predictability is more important than sympathy.

The internal discussion about what Russia should be is inevitable. But that conversation belongs after the war and inside the country.

Once more, buried within the goodwill courtesies and ingratiating overtures toward the West, Melnichenko infact subtly retraces Putin’s own longstanding call for a renewal of the Westphalian system which the West itself had long abandoned:

The choice before the world is not between love for Russia and hatred of it, between punishment and forgiveness, between moral clarity and political cynicism. It is between two kinds of future: one in which major powers again learn to respect each other’s sovereignty, and one in which each attempts to reduce the others to objects of management. The second path has already brought us here.

The most important thing is that we step back from the abyss. Only then can we ask how we reached it and how to arrange the world differently. That work belongs to the next generation. Our role is to ensure they have something to work with.

In short, Melnichenko’s piece is in effect a Trojan horse of sorts: With a subtle appeal to the West’s sympathies—and its ego—meant to lull and disarm Western readers to his true message, he deftly delivers the thematic heart of Putin’s own longstanding arguments, famed from the days of the seminal 2007 Munich speech.

The Economist appeared to sense this hidden subversion in Melnichenko’s language and was forced to quickly publish a third additional ‘addendum’ piece simply to reframe his message to the tune of the correct narrative.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/07/09/the-man-who-would-change-russia

This unprecedented third piece of the day on the same topic is brief and to the point—only a few paragraphs in length. Its purpose is obvious: to control the narrative by highlighting only the most superficial platitudes and inferred “warnings” of Russia’s collapse, while burying the deeper hidden message which unequivocally declares that the West is pushing Russia into a historic reawakening of its national soul, wherein oligarch, corporate powers, and citizens alike unite under one common purpose of betterment for the nation.

The new piece above goes into full damage control mode, disingenuously miscasting Melnichenko’s return to Russia as a bid to save the country from internal “rot”:

…he has lived by Mr Putin’s rules—make money, but keep your nose out of politics. He is talking now because he and his fellow tycoons can no longer afford to ignore the rot of a country they watched descend into tyranny.

In reality, Melnichenko himself clearly states he came back not because of Russia’s corruption, but due to the West’s own unhinged and unprincipled immorality—sanctioning and seizing his assets, etc. Economist shills even openly wrote a disclaimer in order to distance themselves from Melnichenko’s thoughts, just in case their readers happened to intuit the true message beyond the Economist’s superficially phony “collapse” narrative:

Mr Melnichenko issued his warning in over 60 hours of interviews with The Economist (see 1843) and more guardedly in an essay that we are publishing online. This is the first time an oligarch inside Russia has spoken out at such length. We are giving him space not because we agree with all his views or he is a champion of democracy and human rights. Instead he is a pragmatist who wants his businesses to thrive. That is why his call could resonate in a country where wars gone wrong, including the defeat to Japan in 1905, have led to campaigns by industrialists for political change.

In short, the damage control piece desperately tries to change the message, but to those who know how to read carefully, Melnichenko’s words are clear: the war is the West’s fault, and Russia is being restructured as a self-sufficient society of supreme sovereignty where even the previously-alienated liberal class of exiles and pariahs has returned with newfound patriotism in its veins. A nation where oligarchs and big businesses are increasingly working for the benefit of the state and its people, rather than the crooked Western system which deceived and betrayed them.

The Economist tepidly tries to spin this message into an epigram about “reform”, and how the current moment is supposed to reflect the period following Russia’s loss to Japan in 1907, culminating in the Tsar’s overthrow during the later revolution. This is wishful thinking and naked sophistry on the part of the Economist staff, who are too terrified to voice Melnichenko’s true thesis.

It is a sure sign of the times that even Russia’s so-called “oligarchs” are now warning the West that it has freed the Russian genie from the bottle, and that there will be no turning back. But, as per usual, the message has fallen on deaf ears, because the Western system has decayed to such a degree that it can at this point function only on lies, propaganda, and deliberate misinterpretation.

In the West’s fragile court, the acquittal of a single truth is now too dangerous a risk.

Your support is invaluable. If you enjoyed the read, I would greatly appreciate if you subscribed to a monthly/yearly pledge to support my work, so that I may continue providing you with detailed, incisive reports like this one.

Alternatively, you can tip here: buymeacoffee.com/Simplicius

WSJ слишком поздно, слишком слабо

ID.PAGE — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:31:53 +0000

Финальная битва российской войны с Украиной будет вестись в коридорах Кремля.

«Волшебник Кремля» сейчас в кинотеатрах, вымышленный фильм о бывшем пропагандисте Путина Владиславе Суркове, чьи многослойные двусмысленности и обманы вы, возможно, помните с эпохи вмешательства в выборы 2016 года.

Многое изменилось. В последний раз сообщалось, что г-н Сурков был на ламе. Тем временем г-н Путин стал удивительно откровенным, сигнализируя о своих желаниях и потребностях, какими бы нереалистичными они ни были. Четыре года назад, когда он настаивал на безнадежных стратегических корректировках в отношении США и Европы, он был удивительно откровенным в том, почему: его незаконный захват Крыма представлял риск прямой конфронтации с НАТО, если Украина попытается вернуть свою территорию.

Вуаля, сегодня поддерживаемая НАТО Украина использует дальнеобные удары, чтобы сделать держание России на полуострове все более слабым.

Это не сулит ничего хорошего для последнего сигнального запоя машины Путина, в котором она угрожает войной против НАТО из-за своей роли в продлении сопротивления Украины. С какой целью?

Даже если бы НАТО не смогло подняться на это событие в захвате Россией Эстонии или другой уязвимой территории, как мог бы надеяться г-н Путин, результат не стал бы концом украинского сопротивления. Это не было бы концом ударов Украины вглубь России с собственным оружием Украины. Более вероятным результатом будет Германия, Польша, Верлания, страны Балтии и, возможно, другие, решающие, с большей срочностью и меньшей сдержанностью, важность помощи Украине в сдерживании России.

Если кто-то знает, что г-н Путин спрашивает, что стоит за его угрозами НАТО, то это Дональд Трамп, так как эти два разговора. Но это легко догадаться, особенно в свете некоторых других последних новостей, к которым мы доберемся.

Г-н Путин хочет положить конец украинским нападениям на его отечественные нефтеперерабатывающие заводы, которые вызывают у него серьезные проблемы с его подданными. Он хочет, хотя и совершенно безнадежно, войну, войну обратно в коробку, которую она когда-то занимала, войну, которую г-н Путину чувствовал себя комфортно, что он мог бы поддерживать бесконечно.

Проблема в том, что нет решения по диаграмме Венна, удовлетворяющего потребности г-на Путина, которое Запад имеет хоть какую-то силу или желание реализовать.

Смотрите другие важные новости недели или, по крайней мере, то, что журнал Economist считает большой новостью: лояльный к Путину олигарх, король удобрений Андрей Мельниченко, на своих страницах написание призыв к Западу выпустить Россию на условиях, которые г-н Путин не смог продать четыре года назад, прежде чем он смертельно ослабил себя неправильно задуманной войной.

The Economist делает довольно суету из-за предполагаемого открытия здесь. Тем не менее, при всех темных предисльствах, которые г-н Мельниченко использует для продажи своей просьбы, это только показывает, насколько за кривой остаются г-н Путин и его союзники в своей ситуации.

Запад как никогда едины за Украиной; если и существует какой-либо раскол, то только между теми, кто все еще открыт для сделки, и теми, кто заинтересован в дальнейшем ослаблении России.

Дональд Трамп был единственным средством для преодоления разрыва и сильного вооружения компромисса. Только г-н Трамп (он же президент США) мог бы обеспечить необходимую атмосферу сверхдержавы, плюс пайола, плюс гарантии безопасности, чтобы протолкнуть сделку через игольчатое мя.

Теперь даже мистер Трамп не смог этого сделать. Прекращение огня в настоящее время - это лучшее, что мог получить г-н Путин. Исчезла, если она когда-либо существовала, идея о том, что Украина усудает России дополнительную непокоренную территорию.

Этот реалистичный результат невозможен для г-на Путина, более или менее признает г-н Мельниченко. Он продолжает предполагать, что внутри России существует лобби, чтобы продолжать войну даже в отсутствие г-на Путина, рассматривая конфликт как «экзистенциальный», хотя он мог бы более четко указать, имеет ли он в виду экзистенциальный для России или для привилегированных позиций лоббистов.

На самом деле, все данные свидетельствуют о том, что есть также российские националисты, которые способны продолжать реваншистские цели против Украины, признавая, что нынешняя война не служит интересам России.

Проблемой всегда был господин Путин. Он должен уйти, или Запад должен вызвать волю (и желчь), чтобы навязать урегулирование, чтобы поддержать его за счет 40 миллионов украинцев. Такой результат был нереальным четыре года назад, когда г-н Путин впервые искал его. Возможно, это не было нереально в момент пика Трампа, с его триумфальным возвращением на пост президента в январе 2025 года. Или, может быть, это была, однако, дорогая идея распродажи Украины некоторым, которые все еще продвигают теории сговора Трампа и Путина.

Но сейчас мы в другом месте. Будущее опирается на стопку диких карт, что важно в залах самого Кремля. Запад будет продолжать поставлять Украину. Во всех остальных отношениях события проходят в седле таким образом, что никому не должно давать особо комфортного чувства.

Too Little, Too Late, a Putin Oligarch Speaks Up

ID.PAGE — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 08:56:05 +0000

ttps://www.wsj.com/opinion/too-little-too-late-a-putin-oligarch-speaks-up-6acfd2b7July 11, 2026

The final battle of the Russian war with Ukraine will be fought in the corridors of the Kremlin.

“The Wizard of the Kremlin” is in theaters now, a fictionalized movie about onetime Putin propaganda aide Vladislav Surkov, whose layered ambiguities and deceits you may remember from the election-meddling era of 2016.

Much has changed. Mr. Surkov was last reported to be on the lam. Mr. Putin, meanwhile, has become surprisingly frank in signaling his wants and needs, however unrealistic they are. Four years ago, when he was pressing hopeless strategic adjustments on the U.S. and Europe, he was surprisingly candid about why: His illegal seizure of Crimea posed the risk of direct confrontation with NATO if Ukraine tried to reclaim its territory.

Voilà, today a NATO-backed Ukraine is using long-range strikes to make Russia’s hold on the peninsula increasingly tenuous.

This doesn’t bode well for the Putin machine’s latest signaling binge, in which it threatens war against NATO because of its role in prolonging Ukraine’s resistance. To what end?

Even if NATO failed to rise to the occasion in a Russian grab at Estonia or other vulnerable territory, as Mr. Putin might hope, the result wouldn’t be an end to Ukrainian resistance. It wouldn’t be an end to Ukraine’s strikes deep into Russia with Ukraine’s own weapons. The likelier result would be Germany, Poland, the U.K., the Baltics and perhaps others deciding, with more urgency and less restraint, on the importance of assisting Ukraine to hold off Russia.

If anybody knows Mr. Putin’s real ask behind his NATO threats, it’s Donald Trump, since the two talk. But it’s easy to guess, especially in light of some other recent news, which we’ll get to.

Mr. Putin wants an end to Ukrainian attacks on his domestic refineries, which cause him serious trouble with his subjects. He wants, if utterly hopelessly, the war shoved back into the box it once occupied, a war that Mr. Putin had grown comfortable that he could sustain indefinitely.

The problem is there’s no Venn-diagram solution to meet Mr. Putin’s needs that the West has any power or wish to deliver.

See the other big news of the week, or at least what the Economist magazine considers big news: a Putin-loyal oligarch, fertilizer kingpin Andrey Melnichenko, in its pages penning a plea for the West to bail out Russia on basically the terms Mr. Putin failed to sell four years ago before he fatally weakened himself with a misconceived war.

The Economist makes quite a fuss about the alleged opening here. Yet, for all the dark forebodings Mr. Melnichenko uses to sell his request, it only shows how behind-the-curve Mr. Putin and his allies remain in dealing with his situation.

The West is more united than ever behind Ukraine; if any schism exists, it’s only between those still open to a deal and those keen on further weakening Russia.

Donald Trump was the only vehicle for bridging the gap and strong-arming a compromise. Only Mr. Trump (aka a U.S. president) could supply the necessary superpower atmospherics, plus payola, plus security guarantees, to push a deal through the eye of a needle.

Now even Mr. Trump couldn’t do it. A ceasefire at present lines is the best Mr. Putin could get. Gone, if it ever existed, is the idea of Ukraine ceding additional unconquered terrain to Russia.

This realistic outcome is impossible for Mr. Putin, Mr. Melnichenko more or less admits. He goes on to suggest a lobby exists inside Russia to continue the war even in Mr. Putin’s absence, viewing the conflict as “existential” though he might more clearly specify whether he means existential for Russia or for the privileged positions of the lobbyists.

In fact, all evidence suggests there are also Russian nationalists who are capable of nursing continued revanchist aims against Ukraine while recognizing that the current war doesn’t serve Russia’s interests.

The problem always has been Mr. Putin. He must exit or the West must summon the will (and gall) to impose a settlement to prop him up at the expense of 40 million Ukrainians. Such an outcome was unrealistic four years ago when Mr. Putin first sought it. It maybe wasn’t unrealistic at the moment of peak Trump, with his triumphal return to the presidency in January 2025. Or maybe it was, however dear the idea of a Ukraine sellout to some still promoting Trump-Putin collusion theories.

But we’re in a different place now. The future rests on a stack of wild cards, importantly in the halls of the Kremlin itself. The West will keep supplying Ukraine. In every other way, events are in the saddle in a manner that should give nobody a particularly comfortable feeling.

The Economist. Статья Андрея Мельниченко: «Почему расколотая Россия опасна для всего мира».

ID.PAGE — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:23:45 +0000

Великие войны начинаются не там, где гремят первые выстрелы. Линия фронта — это лишь точка, в которой накопившееся давление в конечном итоге прорывается наружу. К этому моменту фундамент уже разрушен: утрачены язык взаимной безопасности, доверие к обязательствам, общее понимание дозволенного и способность воспринимать другую сторону как часть единой системы, а не как угрозу, подлежащую уничтожению. Когда эти связи рвутся, политика больше не управляет событиями — она идет у них на поводу.

Конфликт на Украине — именно такой случай. Он многослоен: это и трагедия народов, веками живших в общем историческом пространстве, и конфликт между Россией и Западом — спор за территории, альянсы, историческую память и будущее мироустройства.

Но в основе всего этого лежит куда более глубокий сбой: современный мир утратил механизм, который некогда позволял ведущим державам сосуществовать в рамках единой системы безопасности, не оспаривая статус друг друга. Когда этот механизм ломается, морализаторские формулы начинают подменять собой архитектуру, а наказание ошибочно принимают за стратегию.

Я не политик и не идеолог. Политики оперируют волей, идеологи — верой. Мой мир — это сложные материальные системы: потоки природных ресурсов, их превращение в удобрения и электроэнергию, логистика, структурирующая эти потоки, и долгосрочные временные горизонты. Такие системы равнодушны к декларациям. Они функционируют до тех пор, пока сохраняются критически важные связи, и разрушаются, когда повреждаются несущие конструкции. Поток подобен реке: его нельзя отменить волевым решением. Его можно перенаправить, но он не исчезнет. Я пытаюсь описывать мир как физик — таким, какой он есть на самом деле, а не таким, каким его хотелось бы видеть.

Моим формирующим жизненным опытом стала Чернобыльская катастрофа 1986 года, произошедшая недалеко от города, в котором я родился. Она служит доказательством того, что сложная система, аккумулирующая в себе колоссальные объемы энергии, не прощает просчетов или высокомерия. Цепочка незначительных событий может перерасти в катастрофу прежде, чем кто-либо осознает происходящее. Этот опыт не позволяет мне относиться к ядерному фактору как к абстракции; это абсолютное ограничение, за пределами которого сама задача теряет смысл. Там, где последствия физически необратимы, подобный подход является единственной приемлемой формой ответственности.

Когда суверенитет становится проблемой

Центральный парадокс нынешнего момента заключается в следующем: спрос на международную безопасность никогда не был столь высок, однако институциональная инфраструктура, созданная для ее обеспечения — нормы, контролирующие органы, рамки общей легитимности, — никогда еще не была столь слабой. В таких условиях возникает соблазн рассматривать суверенитет противников как источник нестабильности. В данном эссе утверждается обратное: разрушение суверенитета не решает проблему безопасности, оно уничтожает единственный механизм, с помощью которого эту проблему можно решить.

Украина — это не просто поле битвы между Россией и Западом. Это государство, общество и политическая воля, заплатившие страшную цену. Украинский суверенитет реален. Однако безопасность Украины, построенная на перманентном отрицании суверенной субъектности России, является столь же нестабильной.

Сосед с понятными интересами и предсказуемой ценой за выполнение своих обязательств представляет собой совершенно иное качество безопасности, нежели сосед, ведомый реваншизмом или чувством осажденной крепости. Устойчивый мир требует суверенитета с обеих сторон — не потому, что они должны любить друг друга, а потому, что только полноценные субъекты способны заключать жизнеспособные соглашения.

Россия сегодня обладает суверенитетом: она принимала и продолжает принимать решения самостоятельно. Это не оценочное суждение, а констатация факта. Россия определила свои жизненно важные интересы, обладает материальной базой для их защиты и несет последствия собственных решений.

Нынешний западный дискурс относительно послевоенной России, при всем разнообразии его политических упаковок, преследует одну цель: уничтожение этого суверенитета или его радикальное ограничение. Логика вполне понятна. Если российский суверенитет воспринимается как угроза, то его ликвидация кажется решением проблемы.

Эта логика подкрепляется примерами из недавней истории. Интеграция послевоенных Германии и Японии в западный мир на долгое время привела к искоренению реваншизма среди побежденных держав. Данная аналогия несовершенна — Россия не является побежденной державой, чье правительство пало, — однако глубинная надежда остается прежней: страна, лишенная стратегической автономии, в конечном итоге примет правила тех, кто её этой автономии лишил.

В таком подходе кроется глубочайшая ошибка. Суверенитет является необходимым условием для любой стабильной архитектуры глобальной безопасности. Это не значит, что суверенитет гарантирует стабильность; действия суверенной страны могут влиять на безопасность других. Но без него создание такой архитектуры попросту невозможно. Прочный мир нельзя заключить с просителем, поскольку проситель не несет подлинной ответственности за свои решения. Любая сделка, заключенная в таких обстоятельствах, приведет не к долгосрочному миру, а лишь к временной паузе между фазами конфликта.

На Западе обсуждаются четыре сценария для послевоенной России. При всем их политическом разнообразии каждый из них влечет за собой утрату или урезание суверенитета, тем самым разрушая единственный механизм, благодаря которому вообще возможно ответственное поведение.

Первый сценарий предполагает униженную Россию, прозябающую на периферии Запада. В долгосрочной перспективе это породит агрессивный реваншизм. Версальский мир был не созданием порядка, а лишь накоплением отложенной энергии. Россия — это не Веймарская Германия, и современный мир не воспроизводит буквально 1920-е годы, однако структурная логика сохраняет свою силу: если суверенитет крупной исторической нации сломлен, он редко исчезает бесследно. Он возвращается в еще более опасной форме.

В рамках второго сценария Россия оказывается в орбите влияния Китая. На первый взгляд, китайский путь выглядит простой альтернативой западному: Россия интегрируется в китайские цепочки поставок и получает доступ к рынкам, технологиям и финансированию, предоставляя взамен сырье, географическое пространство и стратегическую глубину. В краткосрочной перспективе это напоминает рациональный компромисс. В долгосрочной — просто меняет адрес зависимости.

Россия, казалось бы, сохранит внешние атрибуты великой державы, но в реальности станет внешним контуром китайской стратегии: рынком сбыта для китайских товаров, источником ресурсов, транзитным коридором и буфером, поглощающим направленное на Пекин давление. Россия рискует занять позицию, структурно схожую с той, которую Украина занимает для Запада: зону соперничества, где крупные игроки делают свои ходы. Речь идет не об эквивалентности самих стран, а о логике использования пограничного пространства в интересах другого центра силы.

Однако зависимая Россия представляла бы для Китая сомнительную ценность. Очевидная асимметрия такого союза была бы токсичной: на ней легко выстроить антикитайскую коалицию, соседи Китая начали бы проявлять беспокойство, а внутри самой России это со временем породило бы потребность выйти из подчиненного положения. Поведение Китая уже сейчас показывает, что он это понимает. Он охотно использует свое преимущество, но не стремится доводить его до формальной вассальной зависимости. А недавний болезненный опыт технологической зависимости от Запада означает, что Россия добровольно не согласится на аналогичную ситуацию в отношениях с Китаем.

Третий сценарий — фрагментация России, которая быстро станет неуправляемой. Начнется борьба за ядерный арсенал, ресурсы, границы и историю. Этот сценарий разрушает ту самую целостность, которая делает ядерное сдерживание эффективным. Цена, уже заплаченная в постсоветских конфликтах — включая трагедию на Украине, — делает подобный исход, на мой взгляд, неприемлемым.

Последняя возможность для России — превратиться в крепость: закрытую, мобилизованную, находящуюся в состоянии перманентной осады. Технологии, наука, капитал и общественное доверие не развиваются в условиях бесконечного чрезвычайного положения. Такой порядок не прекращает войну; он превращает конфликт из события в сам способ организации государства.

Формы различаются — системный результат остается неизменным.

Почему истощение не является стратегией

Переговоры работают тогда, когда обе стороны верят, что оппонент способен и готов отстаивать свою позицию до самого конца. Когда одна из сторон приходит к выводу, что противник блефует или попросту неспособен довести дело до конца, она перестает искать решение за столом переговоров. Это не оправдание применения силы в каком-либо конкретном случае. Это описание того, как в действительности происходит дипломатический провал: не только из-за злого умысла, но и из-за взаимного краха доверия к способности сторон держать удар. Понимание этого механизма не тождественно одобрению его последствий.

В глазах России конфликт на Украине — это война против Запада в целом, ведущаяся на западные деньги, западным оружием и с использованием западных технологий. Данное восприятие определяет каждое решение, принимаемое Москвой.

Корни конфликта частично кроются в структурном дисбалансе, который сохранялся в Европе после окончания холодной войны: озабоченности Москвы в сфере безопасности выслушивались, но никогда не воспринимались серьезно. После политических потрясений на Украине в 2014 году Россия пришла к выводу, что возможности дипломатии исчерпаны, и перешла к действиям — сначала в Крыму, а затем, восемь лет спустя, в четырех восточных и южных регионах Украины.

Изначальные цели Москвы не были достигнуты быстро. По мере затягивания конфликта Россия пересматривала то, что она сочла бы приемлемым исходом. Её публично заявленные условия сузились до трех пунктов: признание территорий, на которые Россия теперь претендует согласно своей конституции; юридические гарантии защиты русскоязычного населения; и официальное обязательство Украины соблюдать нейтралитет.

Запад тем временем переформулировал собственную цель. Дискуссия о будущей архитектуре европейской безопасности — которая так толком и не состоялась — была подменена оперативной задачей: истощением. Конкретный смысл этого термина варьируется в зависимости от столицы: одни говорят об ослаблении военного потенциала России, другие — о сдерживании реваншизма, третьи — о сигнале для потенциальных агрессоров в других частях света. На практике конфликт превратился в инструмент затяжного давления на Москву.

Формула «поддерживать Украину столько, сколько потребуется» удобна тем, что позволяет отложить сложный вопрос: какой порядок безопасности должен в конечном итоге установиться в Европе и какое место в нем занимает Россия? Географически боевые действия локализованы на украинской земле; формально воюют сами украинцы. Это устраивает Запад: самые тяжелые человеческие и экономические издержки ложатся на Украину и Россию, в то время как последствия для западных экономик, хоть и ощутимы, оцениваются как вполне терпимые. Однако у этой схемы есть стратегический изъян, который редко выносится на публичное обсуждение.

Вывод, который Москва делает из всего этого, прямолинеен: в нынешних условиях первоначальная цель России — новый европейский порядок безопасности, в котором Россия является полноценным участником, а не объектом управления, — недостижима. Отдельные сражения можно выиграть или проиграть, но войну на истощение саму по себе выиграть нельзя. Она лишь консервирует проблему, вместо того чтобы решать её.

Текущий формат не может продолжаться бесконечно. Ситуация, при которой экономически и технологически превосходящая коалиция обеспечивает армию противника, ограничивая собственное прямое участие, рано или поздно уступит место чему-то другому: либо иной, более прямой форме конфронтации, либо политическому урегулированию. Вопрос не в том, произойдет ли этот переход, а в том, когда именно и на каких условиях.

Ядерное оружие делает этот вопрос экзистенциальным. Сдерживание работает не просто потому, что оружие существует, а потому, что существуют рациональные центры принятия решений, каналы связи открыты и обе стороны понимают, где пролегают границы допустимого. Когда доверие рушится, а эмоции вытесняют расчет, ядерное оружие перестает быть инструментом сдерживания последнего порядка и превращается в фоновую радиацию постоянного риска. Любая стратегия, рассматривающая ядерную эскалацию как управляемое продолжение конвенционального давления, опирается на ложное допущение: будто сложную систему можно подтолкнуть к самому краю и остановить ровно там, где это политически удобно. Реальные системы так не работают.

Само существование суверенитета и взаимное признание необходимости компромисса еще не гарантируют, что соглашение будет достигнуто. Не менее важно и то, в каком направлении этот суверенитет применяется. Будет ли он поддерживать общую систему или разрушит её — определяется прежде всего внутренней политикой государства. Именно поэтому вопрос о внутренней траектории развития России невозможно решить извне.

То, как Россия ведет свой собственный политический процесс и на какие цели она направляет свой суверенитет, — это вопрос, который может быть решен только внутри самой России, без оглядки на внешние предпочтения. Любая попытка управлять этим процессом извне не просто обречена на провал, но и контрпродуктивна: она разрушает то самое условие — суверенитет, — без которого устойчивый мир невозможен в принципе. Это необходимо принять — не из чувства симпатии к России, а из понимания того, что альтернативы этому признанию просто не существует.

У меня есть основания полагать, что это осознание придет, и эти основания можно понять, лишь объяснив, почему оно не пришло раньше.

Те, кто строил новую Россию — предприниматели, ученые, деятели искусства, спортсмены, профессионалы, создававшие её экономику, её смыслы и её репутацию в мире, — в большинстве своем считали себя интернационалистами. В этом не было ни слабости, ни наивности. Это был очевидный выбор в мире, где глобальная интеграция казалась необратимой. Наука развивалась по международным стандартам, технологии закупались у лучших поставщиков, права и обязанности регулировались западным правом в западных судах, дети учились в лучших университетах мира, а капитал размещался там, где он был защищен. Этот выбор означал — осознанно или нет — передачу значительной части суверенитета внешним системам. Не потому, что таково было слепое желание. А потому, что правила казались нейтральными, а доступ к ним — открытым для всех.

На протяжении многих лет российские власти предупреждали, что это ошибка. Сторонники глобальной интеграции видели в этих предупреждениях лишь пережиток советского мышления. Время доказало, что они ошибались, — и не потому, что глобализации не существовало, а потому, что она никогда не была нейтральной.

Санкции продемонстрировали это со всей очевидностью. Они были написаны конкретными людьми в интересах конкретных сторон, и они могут быть пересмотрены в отношении других лиц на основании чисто политического решения. Мой собственный опыт столкновения с западными санкциями имеет здесь значение не как личная обида, а как доказательство того, что вся инфраструктура глобализации политически обусловлена. Активы могут быть заморожены, а права, некогда считавшиеся незыблемыми, растворяются в тот самый момент, когда принимается политическое решение.

Системный эффект санкций оказался гораздо шире их первоначального замысла. Отключение от глобальных систем — финансовых, технологических, юридических, образовательных — поставило креативный класс России перед выбором, которого он никак не ожидал: либо полная эмиграция с разрывом всех связей, либо возвращение к вопросу, от которого он уклонялся три десятилетия: как построить свой собственный мир внутри России, по своим правилам и по своим стандартам.

Этот процесс не будет ни быстрым, ни легким. Но он неизбежен, поскольку глобального мира в прежнем понимании больше не существует. Те, кто умеет созидать, теперь выбирают не между Россией и глобальным пространством, а между Россией и фрагментированным миром, где каждый блок устанавливает свои правила. В этих условиях логика созидания направлена внутрь: строить то, что будет привлекательным — как для тех, кто уехал давным-давно, вместе с распадом Советского Союза, так и для тех, кто уехал недавно, да и для всего русскоязычного мира в целом.

Жесткие ограничения — военное давление, экономические санкции, информационная война — вынуждают быть эффективными. А эффективность возможна только тогда, когда все социальные слои работают сообща. В каждом из них достаточно мыслящих людей, способных осознать, что минимальный общий интерес — сохранение суверенитета — у них совпадает. Со всем остальным они смогут разобраться между собой.

Суверенитет — это вопрос не только для государства. Это важнейший вопрос для всех, кто живет и работает внутри страны: для граждан, бизнеса, институтов.

Для граждан величие страны измеряется не громкостью ее лозунгов, а тем, насколько она защищает интересы своих людей. Люди голосуют ногами и своими жизненными стратегиями. Если страна лишена суверенитета, она рано или поздно теряет тех, кто способен быть её ресурсом, а не бременем.

Бизнесу, ведущему международную деятельность, суверенитет необходим ничуть не меньше. Можно выстраивать сложные структуры владения и составлять контракты в самых продвинутых юрисдикциях. Однако в конечном счете наилучшую защиту договоров и инвестиций обеспечивает стоящее за ними сильное государство. Компании, не являющиеся ни американскими, ни китайскими, сталкиваются с неривлекательным выбором: снабжать крупных игроков ресурсами и рынками сбыта в обмен на защиту либо смириться с ролью локального игрока, находящегося под постоянной угрозой со стороны внешних решений. Суверенная альтернатива — согласование своей стратегии с государством, которое рассматривает крупный бизнес как часть своего стратегического потенциала, — является единственной, которая не требует отказа от собственного будущего. В XXI веке суверенитет государства имеет прямое экономическое измерение: это способность создавать добавленную стоимость внутри собственной юрисдикции и направлять её на укрепление своего собственного, а не чужого суверенитета.

Российское бизнес-сообщество состоит из людей, способных не просто выживать в заданных правилах, но и менять саму среду: проектировать и создавать новые рынки, отрасли и системы управления. В последние десятилетия их отбор шел не по идеологическому признаку, а через конкуренцию, кризисы и реструктуризации — это был отбор тех, кто умеет просчитывать последствия, слышать чужие интересы и находить работающие компромиссы. Их роль в дискуссии о направлении российского суверенитета носит не политический, а созидательный характер; это вопрос не о том, кто управляет, а о том, что строится.

Крупный российский бизнес, инвестирующий в суверенную Россию, со временем станет её неотъемлемой частью. То же самое произойдет и с другими важными институтами. Как следствие, изменится и сама Россия. Если мы будем стремиться к суверенитету, который созидает единство между гражданами и институтами, я надеюсь, что со временем мы исправим все внутренние дисбалансы, за которые мы тоже несем ответственность — уже тем фактом, что когда-то были рады остаться в стороне.

Притягательность предсказуемости

Суверенная Россия не будет удобной для каждой страны. Однако в долгосрочной перспективе она окажется более выгодной, чем любые альтернативы. Выбор для внешних игроков лежит не между дружественной и враждебной Россией. Это выбор между Россией, чьё поведение предсказуемо, и Россией, чья траектория развития неизвестна. В мире, который формируется прямо сейчас, предсказуемость гораздо важнее, чем симпатия.

Внутренняя дискуссия о том, какой должна быть Россия, неизбежна. Но этот разговор должен состояться после завершения военного конфликта и исключительно внутри самой страны.

Выбор, стоящий перед миром, — это не выбор между любовью к России и ненавистью к ней, между наказанием и прощением, между моральной чистотой и политическим цинизмом. Это выбор между двумя вариантами будущего: тем, в котором ведущие державы снова научатся уважать суверенитет друг друга, и тем, в котором каждая из них пытается низвести остальных до положения объектов управления. Второй путь уже привел нас туда, где мы сейчас находимся.

Самое главное сегодня — сделать шаг назад от бездны. Только тогда мы сможем задаться вопросом, как мы у неё оказались и как обустроить этот мир иначе. Это — работа дляследующего поколения. Наша же роль заключается в том, чтобы гарантировать, что у них будет с чем работать.

Андрей Мельниченко — крупный российский промышленник, находящийся под западными санкциями.

Sivi Aberg 1973

Andrey Matuzov — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 19:32:29 +0000

Sivi Aberg, Hollywood’s reigning Deb Star is featured in a Batman episode with Cesar Romero for ABC-TV. She won the Miss Deb Star title earlier this year against tremendous competition. In answer to my inquiry as to what tipped the scales in her favor, she said. “I think judges are influenced by personality more than anything else. You can look beautiful, but it doesn’t come across without other elements. Next to personality Sivi feels that posture, the ability to move with grace and poise, is of tremendous importance.

“In Sweden we stress sports, and in the schools we have class gymnastic and group Sivi recommends that every girl check her posture. “‘There are so many faulty ways of walking, moving from side to side, shifting your weight from the knees and putting your heels down first when you take steps. Any of these will destroy your rhythm. With a coordinated walk you swing your legs freely from the hips, transferring your weight from the back foot to the front. Test this by placing a book on top of your head as you walk. If it falls off, you know your rhythm needs working. It tikes patience to correct a faulty walk, but it is worth the effort.

“I think with it realizing it,” Sivi said, “men instinctively are attracted to a woman who moves rhythmically.” When you are in the house, Sivi suggests you practice walking in bare feet. “Women who be me dependent on high heels shorten a tendon in the back of the heel. They find it painful to put their feet flat, and eventually this interferes with their grace of movement. “For another useful technique, I also suggest that you try walking backward. “It is less likely that you will make mistakes when you reverse your bearing. Walking is a great exercise, and you’ll do more of it when your feet are in good condition.” was Sivi’s final suggestion.

Абрамович и Березовский про Нетаньяху

Strangelove Associates — Sat, 6 Jun 2026 15:36:58 +0000

Первая мировая

Strangelove Associates — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 18:27:25 +0000

Первая мировая - это вот взяли в 1914-м году этих славных и милых людей образца XVIII века - и бросили их на пулемёты. которые и косили их сотнями тысяч.

Первая мировая - это был реальный п***ц. Про нее несколько книг прочел - и в общем да, тогда человечество сломалось, и до сих пор не восстановилось, если по чесноку.

Ценности Джимми Картера

Strangelove Associates — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 18:23:46 +0000

В воскресенье утром, всего через пять дней после своего 95-летия, Джимми Картер упал дома, готовясь к церкви. Он сильно ударился головой и оказался в больнице. Врачи наложили 14 швов на левый глаз. Его лицо прикрывал сын, а бровь покрыла повязка.
Команда осторожно спросила, не стоит ли переносить запланированное мероприятие в Нэшвилле.
Ответ Джимми Картера был кратким:
"Моим приоритетом было поехать в Нэшвилл, чтобы строить дома. "
В тот же вечер он вышел на сцену аудиториума Раймана в кепке Atlanta Braves, завязанном и битым лицом. Сотни добровольцев встретили его стоя. А на следующее утро он был на стройке.
В 95 лет.
С молотком в руке.
Это была не демонстрация. Это был настоящий Джимми Картер.
Джеймс Эрл Картер-младший родился 1 октября 1924 года в Плейнс Тауншипе, Джорджия. Его отец был фермером, а мать медсестрой. В 68 лет она присоединилась к Корпусу мира, потому что верила, что может принести пользу людям.
Вот где Джимми усвоил главный жизненный урок:
сервис - это не то, о чем говорят. Вот что они делают.
Служил в военно-морском флоте США, был сенатором штата Джорджия, губернатором Джорджии, с 1977 по 1981 год был 39-м президентом Соединенных Штатов Америки.
А потом покинул Белый дом.
И продолжал служить.
В 1984 году, через три года после окончания президентского срока, Картер взял молот и присоединился к Habitat for Humanity Может тогда он думал, что это будет разовая запись.
Но это стало делом его жизни.
Вместе со своей женой Розалинной он помогал строить и ремонтировать дома для людей, которые в этом нуждались. Год за годом. Страна за страной. Крыша к крыше.
В 2015 году, когда Джимми было 90 лет, врачи обнаружили у него агрессивную форму рака, которая уже распространилась на мозг.
Он пришел к журналистам с улыбкой и сказал, что прожил чудесную жизнь и готов принять любой результат.
И случилось чудо.
Лечение сработало.
В конце того же года обследования больше не показали признаков рака.
И он снова вернулся к строительству домов.
В 2019 году Картер сломал бедро. Я выздоровел. Снова на работу.
А потом было то воскресное утро, когда после падения и 14 швов он все равно пошел на свою миссию.
За десятилетия работы Джимми и Розалин Картер вместе со 100 000 добровольцами помогли построить, отремонтировать или восстановить более 4400 домов по всему миру.
Тысячи семей получили не просто крышу над головой.
У них есть дом.
Потому что человек, который занял высшую должность в своей стране, никогда не переставал приходить туда, где нужна помощь.
29 декабря 2024 года Джимми Картер скончался в своем доме в Плейнс, штат Джорджия в окружении семьи.
Ему было 100 лет.
Он стал самым долго действующим президентом в истории США.
Он не был идеальным. Идеальных людей не существует.
Но спустя более сорока лет после своего президентства он продолжал делать то, что считал правильным: подбирать молотки и помогать нуждающимся в доме.
Когда он был внизу, он был наверху.
Когда болеешь - обратно на работу.
Когда тело попросило остановиться, оно напомнило себе, что где-то есть люди, которые ждут помощи.
Некоторые люди говорят о своих ценностях.
Джимми Картер делал это...

«Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line»

Andrey Matuzov — Fri, 5 Jun 2026 18:02:05 +0000

Автор: Рори Кормак (Rory Cormac)
Издательство: Oxford University Press
Дата выхода: Май 2026 года

Профессор международных отношений Ноттингемского университета Рори Кормак, признанный эксперт по истории британской разведки, выпустил исследование, которое заставляет совершенно иначе взглянуть на методы информационной войны Запада в XX веке. Книга основана на колоссальном массиве из восьми тысяч недавно рассекреченных документов из фондов Национального архива Великобритании и посвящена деятельности Департамента информационных исследований (Information Research Department, IRD) — глубоко засекреченной структуры, созданной британским правительством в начале Холодной войны.

Официально IRD должен был заниматься продвижением демократических ценностей и противодействием советской пропаганде. На деле же, как доказывает Кормак, эта организация превратилась в фабрику «черной» дезинформации и фальшивок мирового масштаба. Используя архивные шифры и внутреннюю переписку, автор шаг за шагом реконструирует самые грязные и изощренные операции британских спецслужб.

В центре повествования — механика создания так называемых «фантомов». IRD штамповал поддельные документы, якобы исходящие от советского руководства, министерств или компартий третьих стран, чтобы спровоцировать внутренние расколы в соцблоке и дискредитировать Москву на международной арене. Кормак подробно описывает, как британские оперативники фабриковали фальшивые приказы, липовые манифесты национально-освободительных движений и даже засылали своих агентов, переодетых в хиппи, на всемирные фестивали молодежи и студентов для ведения подрывной работы изнутри.

Главная ценность исследования Кормака заключается в том, что он уходит от привычных штампов о «джентльменских» методах МИ-6. Автор показывает циничный, системный и технологичный подход к искажению реальности, где поддельный бланк или вовремя запущенная в прессу фальшивка ценились выше, чем классический шпионаж. Книга предлагает детальную анатомию того, как зарождались современные государственные инструменты манипуляции общественным мнением, и демонстрирует, что нынешние информационные войны — это лишь прямое продолжение секретных протоколов середины прошлого века.

China as a possible path toward a civilization of conscience and talent.

ND Matthews — Tue, 2 Jun 2026 12:43:05 +0000

Introduction

SARAFAN, Conscience and the Future of the Human Being

This article is a development of Andrey Matuzov’s book “Architecture of the Future | SARAFAN | Conscience as a System.” It is not a retelling of the book, not a shortened version and not a separate commentary on a related theme. It is a continuation of one of its central lines: conscience is treated not as a private moral feeling, but as a systemic regulator of civilization; talent is treated as the source of the future; and SARAFAN is treated as an architecture in which action is once again connected with consequences, while the human being returns to the center as a bearer of meaning, measure and responsibility.

The main problem of the modern world is not only a crisis of politics, economics or international institutions. At a deeper level, it is a crisis of connectedness. The connection between knowledge and meaning has been broken. The connection between talent and responsibility has been broken. The connection between money and contribution has been broken. The connection between power and the inner limit has been broken. The connection between technology and the human being has been broken. Systems continue to operate, decisions are made, markets move, algorithms calculate, but the most important capacity is increasingly disappearing: the ability to see the whole and to hold the consequences of one’s own actions.

The first part of the article is devoted to the origin of conscience. In it, conscience is understood as the building material of civilization. It emerges not as abstract morality, but as an inner pause between impulse and action. It is precisely this pause that makes trust, duty, ritual, law, community and the long horizon possible. Special attention is given to the Neolithic Revolution, when the human being moved from the logic of the pack to settled life, rules, family, memory and responsibility. The image of Adam and the “clay people” is interpreted symbolically here: as the transition from the biological human being to the human being of measure, capable of distinguishing good from evil and holding consequences.

The second part reveals the eternal struggle between conscience and psychopathy. Psychopathy is understood here not as a casual insult and not as simple antisocial behavior, but as a mode of existence without an internal limit. Psychopathy breaks the connection between action and consequence, between talent and responsibility, between money and contribution. In the modern world, it becomes especially dangerous because it often disguises itself as efficiency, decisiveness, managerial coldness and the ability to act without doubt. Where conscience is replaced by procedure, KPIs and fragmented responsibility, the person without an inner brake gains an advantage. This is where the key SARAFAN formula appears: talent without conscience becomes a weapon; money without conscience becomes an accelerator of psychopathy; and AI must not be a judge, but a mirror of consequences.

The third part turns to the future. It considers China as a possible path toward a civilization of conscience and talent. Not as an ideal model, not as an object of political admiration and not as a ready-made utopia, but as a major civilizational laboratory of the twenty-first century, where ancient memory, state will, infrastructure, technology, production, education, AI and the long horizon are being brought together. China is important because it is trying to assemble modernization not only through the market and financial capital, but through scale, discipline of time, development, infrastructure and civilizational memory. However, this path will be viable only under one condition: if the strength of the system is held by conscience, if AI does not become an apparatus of control, and if talent does not become a resource of power without a right to consequences.

Together, the three parts form a single logic. The first answers the question of where conscience comes from and why civilization is impossible without it. The second shows what happens when conscience is displaced by psychopathy and when talent, money and power are separated from responsibility. The third asks the question of the future: where can an architecture emerge that is capable of reconnecting conscience, talent, money, AI and the long horizon?

The main idea of the article is simple: the future will not be built by technology alone, capital alone, the state alone, the market alone or ideology alone. It becomes possible only where talent enters the circuit of conscience, where money becomes a record of contribution, where AI restores the visibility of consequences, and where civilization learns again to hold the human being as a source of meaning rather than as an object of management.

This is the development of SARAFAN: an attempt to assemble a new architecture of the future from three load-bearing elements - conscience, talent and connectedness.

Part I

Conscience as the Building Material of Civilization

SARAFAN, Adam, Clay People and the Organ of Inner Measure

The central idea of Andrey Matuzov’s book “Architecture of the Future | SARAFAN | Conscience as a System” is not that the modern world has simply “lost morality” in the everyday sense. That formulation is too weak. The issue is deeper: civilization has lost its internal limiter, the mechanism that connects action with consequences. In the logic of SARAFAN, conscience ceases to be merely a moral category and becomes a regulator of complex social architecture, a feedback mechanism that registers the crossing of a limit before destruction becomes irreversible.

That is why SARAFAN does not speak about moral preaching, but about the engineering of civilization. Without conscience, talent becomes a weapon, power becomes an apparatus, knowledge becomes a fragment, and the institution turns into a machine without an inner brake.

In this sense, conscience is not an ornament of the human being and not a private religious feeling. Conscience is the building material of civilization. Not a brick, not cement and not law in itself, but the invisible material that allows the bricks to hold together. A law can be written. An institution can be created. A city can be built. But if inside the human being there is no organ that forces him to correlate action with consequences, all of this begins to work against the human being. Then law becomes procedure, economics becomes extraction, politics becomes control, and culture becomes packaging.

Conscience begins not with prohibition, but with a pause. A person wants to take a step, but something inside delays him. Not fear of punishment, not calculation, not an external order, but an inner feeling of boundary. This pause is the first building element of civilization. From it later arise promise, oath, duty, trust, reputation, contract, court, law, state and, ultimately, the very possibility of a complex society. While this pause exists, the human being is capable of being not only a bearer of desire, but also a bearer of measure.

The philosophical tradition has always known that conscience is difficult to reduce to a single definition. In Alberto Giubilini’s article “Conscience” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, conscience is described as a multilayered concept: as a capacity for self-knowledge and self-assessment, as a source of moral beliefs, as a motivational force of duty, and as the core of personal moral identity. The same article emphasizes that there is no single universal psychological or philosophical model of conscience.

But this is precisely what matters for SARAFAN. If older disciplines argue about “what conscience is,” SARAFAN asks a more applied question: what happens to a system when conscience is removed from it?

The answer is severe: the system continues to work, but it ceases to be a civilization.

Where Conscience Is Located in the Human Being

Scientifically speaking, the human being has no separate gland of conscience. There is no small organ that can be pointed to and called the place where good and evil live. But if the question is posed not metaphorically, but biologically, then the organ of conscience is the brain. More precisely, not the entire brain as a mass of tissue, but a network of areas that connect emotion, memory, social knowledge, prediction of consequences and the ability to stop action.

In the work by Jorge Moll, Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Frank Krueger and Jordan Grafman, “The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition,” published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, moral thinking is described not as the work of a single zone, but as the integration of several levels: social contextual knowledge in the prefrontal cortex, social-semantic knowledge in the temporal cortex, and emotional-motivational states connected to cortico-limbic circuits. The authors speak of a “remarkably consistent network of brain regions” involved in moral cognition.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is especially important. In the study by Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser and Antonio Damasio, “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements,” published in Nature, damage to this area was associated with changes in moral judgments in severe dilemmas. The authors conclude that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is critical for normal judgments about right and wrong in a certain class of moral situations, especially where the decision requires emotional aversion to causing harm.

But this is not enough. Conscience is not only a cold calculation of consequences. It is also a bodily experience of a boundary. In the work by Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Vince D. Calhoun and Kent A. Kiehl, “Neural Basis of Moral Verdict and Moral Deliberation,” a distinction is made between moral deliberation and moral verdict. The authors associate the moral verdict “this is wrong” with activity in the anterior insula and basal ganglia, while moral deliberation is linked to higher cortical areas including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and temporoparietal junction.

Therefore, the correct formulation is this: the biological organ of conscience is the brain, but the human experience of conscience is broader than the brain as a “calculator.” In culture, conscience is often felt as the heart, the chest, shame, heaviness, the impossibility of taking a step. That is why ancient cultures spoke of the heart as the center of inner truth. Modern neuroscience clarifies: the heart is the cultural organ of conscience, the brain is the biological organ of conscience, and language and ritual are the social organs of conscience.

This is where the bridge to SARAFAN appears. Conscience is not stored only inside the skull. It is held in the human being by the brain, but it is reproduced by society through language, family, ritual, memory, reputation, duty and joint action. If these external circuits are destroyed, the brain remains, intelligence remains, talent remains, but conscience as a civilizational function weakens. A person may understand the rules, but cease to feel the consequences.

The Neolithic: When Conscience Became a Civilizational Necessity

Scientifically, it cannot be said that conscience “emerged” on one specific day of the Neolithic. Moral behavior, cooperation, care, shame, reciprocity and the suppression of egoistic impulse have much older evolutionary roots. In the article by Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish, “Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality,” morality is considered as a form of cooperation: it requires either suppressing one’s own interest for the sake of another, or equating one’s own interest with the interest of others through reciprocity, fairness and adherence to norms. Robert Boyd, in “A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species,” shows that culture and social norms allowed humans to cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals, which radically distinguishes humans from other species.

But SARAFAN is not speaking about the biological birth of conscience. It is speaking about something else: the moment when conscience became a construction technology of society. And this moment is connected precisely with the Neolithic Revolution.

When the human being was a hunter and gatherer, his social environment was relatively small, mobile and immediate. The consequences of an action often returned quickly. A violation of trust was visible. Conflict was bodily. But the transition to settled life radically changed the human regime. Settlement, field, grain, storage, inheritance, permanent neighbors, division of labor, cult of ancestors, common ritual, seasonal calendar, home, boundary and long horizon appeared. Now action no longer disappeared immediately. It began to leave a trace.

This is what makes the Neolithic not merely an economic event, but a moral and architectural turning point. Colin Renfrew, in “Inception of Agriculture and Rearing in the Middle East,” notes that the origins of farming and herding in the Middle East were traditionally associated with permanent settlements, but it is now clear that sedentism preceded the domestication of plants and animals. He also speaks of a cultural sequence and a “symbolic revolution” accompanying it. In other words, first the way of living together changes, then the economy changes, and with them the symbolic and normative structure changes.

Göbekli Tepe is especially important for this theme. According to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia includes monumental megalithic structures erected by hunter-gatherers in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, roughly between 9600 and 8200 BCE, probably for ritual purposes. In the materials of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, “Taş Tepeler - The Discovery of a Neolithic Cultural Landscape,” this region is described not as a single exception, but as a network of complex Neolithic communities, where monuments performed ritual and social functions and community cohesion was a key factor of survival and adaptation.

This is fundamental. Civilization does not begin with the state. Not with the market. Not with the army. Not even with writing. It begins at the moment when a group of people creates a common ritual center around which trust, memory, labor and fear of violating measure can be held.

The study by Laura Dietrich, Julia Meister, Oliver Dietrich, Jens Notroff, Janika Kiep, Julia Heeb, André Beuger and Brigitta Schütt, “Cereal Processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey,” published in PLOS One, shows that more than 7,000 objects related to the processing of plant food were analyzed at Göbekli Tepe, and the authors connect this with the preparation of large collective meals and the organization of labor for monumental construction.

In SARAFAN terms, this means the following: even before the classical state, a social mechanism appears that connects labor, ritual, food, memory and collective effort. And this mechanism requires conscience as an inner measure.

Adam as the Symbol of the First Human Being of Measure

This is where myth speaks in a language that archaeology cannot use.

In the Book of Genesis, man is created from the dust of the ground, and God breathes into him the breath of life. In Genesis 2:7, man is formed from the dust of the ground, after which God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man becomes a living being. In Genesis 3:22, the second key point appears: man has become “knowing good and evil.”

For SARAFAN, this is not simply a religious story about the Fall. It is a symbolic recording of the transition from the biological human being to the human being of measure. Adam is important here not as the “first Homo sapiens.” This clearly does not coincide with archaeology. Adam is important as the first human being of another type: the human being in whom the capacity to distinguish appears. Before him - material, earth, clay, life as biology. After him - inner law, shame, responsibility, prohibition, memory of violation.

The theme of “Adam and the clay people” must therefore be formulated very carefully. In the canonical Book of Genesis there is no direct doctrine of “clay people” as a separate biological race before Adam. That would be a false and dangerous literalism. Genesis contains the image of the human being from dust and the image of the knowledge of good and evil. The motif of the “clay” or “earthly” human being, who becomes fully human only after the entrance of spirit, is more strongly developed in apocryphal and Gnostic traditions.

In the text “The Hypostasis of the Archons,” known from the Nag Hammadi corpus, and in modern scholarship such as Marcel Poorthuis’s article “The Hypostasis of the Archons 1-18 Revisited: The Genesis Account of the Good Creation as a Trap by the Jealous Demiurge,” the human being is modeled from earth, but remains incomplete until spirit enters him and he becomes a living soul. Poorthuis discusses the human made from earth, the breathing into his face, the soul-endowed Man and the Spirit that descended and came to dwell within him.

A parallel motif exists in the Qur’an. In Surah Al-Hijr 15:26-29, the human being is created from sounding clay, from molded mud, after which God speaks of breathing His spirit into him. In Surah As-Sajdah 32:7-9, a similar sequence appears: the creation of the human being from clay, then formation, then the breathing of spirit and the granting of hearing, sight and hearts.

These texts should not be merged into one doctrine. But they point to a shared ancient archetype: the human as material becomes fully human only when an internal regulator enters him. Earth becomes human not because of the shape of the body, but because of the capacity to answer. Clay receives not merely life, but measure.

The Clay Human Being Within Us

The most important clarification is this: “clay people” in this article must not be understood biologically, racially or ethnically. This is not a story about some people “with a soul” and others “without a soul.” Such a turn would be destructive and contrary to the very logic of SARAFAN. We are speaking about regimes inside the human being and inside civilization.

There is a clay regime in every human being. It is the regime of impulse, gain, fear, force, domination and immediate reaction. It is not necessarily evil. It is simply pre-conscientious. It acts before measure. It wants, takes, protects, attacks, justifies itself and does not see distant consequences.

And there can be an Adamic regime in every human being. This is the regime of distinction. It does not abolish strength, desire, intelligence or talent. It adds an internal boundary to them. It asks: what will happen later? What will this do to another person? What will this do to the fabric? Will trust still be possible after my action?

Civilization arises where the Adamic regime begins to hold the clay regime. Not to destroy it, because the human being cannot cease to be bodily and earthly. But to hold it. Clay is necessary. Without it there is no form, labor, home, bread, craft or city. But clay without spirit becomes mass. Material without measure becomes dangerous.

This is why SARAFAN speaks of conscience as the building material of civilization. Not because conscience is “kind.” But because it turns human material into a form suitable for shared life.

Conscience as Fabric, Not as Code

The main error of the modern world is that it tries to replace conscience with codes. Ethical codes, compliance, regulations, procedures, KPIs, ESG reports, policy papers - all of these can be useful, but none of them is conscience. They are external forms. Conscience works precisely where formalization is not yet possible, but responsibility is already necessary.

In the SARAFAN book, this distinction is drawn very precisely: conscience cannot be reduced to a code, because a code formalizes, and formalization always bypasses living complexity. Conscience operates where there is no instruction, where it is profitable not to limit oneself, where the future has not yet been calculated, but has already been touched by action.

Therefore, conscience is not a moral sermon. It is the feedback of a complex system. Just as pain in the body tells us that tissue has been damaged, conscience tells us that social fabric is being damaged. Pain is unpleasant, but it saves the body. Conscience is unpleasant, but it saves civilization. A society that switches off pain can move faster, but it will destroy itself without noticing the injuries. A society that switches off conscience can be managed more efficiently, but it ceases to understand why it is being managed.

This makes clear why the modern system so often raises people without an internal brake to the top. Where success is measured by speed, hardness, controllability and the ability not to be distracted by consequences, the absence of conscience begins to look like a professional advantage. A person who does not feel boundaries makes decisions faster. A person who does not hold the whole optimizes the fragment more easily. A person who does not experience guilt fits better into the language of reporting. This is how not medical, but social psychopathy emerges.

SARAFAN describes this as a regime in which action is separated from the experience of consequences. Such a person may be rational, efficient and formally correct, but may not feel the destruction of the whole. This is why the system of external regulators begins to reward this type of action: it is faster, cleaner in reporting and more compatible with KPIs.

Why Talent Without Conscience Becomes a Weapon

Talent in itself is not good. This is a crucial thesis. Talent is an amplifier. It increases the scale of action, the depth of influence and the speed of transforming reality. But if talent accelerates faster than conscience is built into the system, it becomes a weapon. If conscience suppresses talent completely, stagnation appears. Therefore, the task of civilization is not to choose between talent and conscience, but to connect them in a single architecture. In SARAFAN, this link is formulated as follows: talent amplifies the scale of action, while conscience defines the admissible limit.

From this follows the main challenge of the twenty-first century: humanity has learned to accelerate talent, but has not learned to hold it within the circuit of conscience. It has created universities, corporations, laboratories, platforms, funds, venture markets, indexes, grants, ratings and algorithms. But it has not created a civilizational architecture in which talent cannot be alienated from responsibility.

This is why SARAFAN proposes not another ethical slogan, but a new framework of compatibility. Within this framework, a person who does not feel consequences is not necessarily “punished.” He loses compatibility. The system does not need to hold a moral trial. It simply stops connecting with the one who tears the fabric, destroys trust and breaks the long horizon. In the SARAFAN book this is formulated harshly: within the SARAFAN environment, the absence of conscience leads to the loss of compatibility, because a person who does not feel consequences is dangerous to the whole and cannot be a connecting link in a project.

This is more important than any code. A code can be bypassed. Reputation can be bought. Law can be interpreted. But compatibility cannot be faked for long. If a person destroys connectedness, he gradually ceases to be a node of the network. His talent may remain strong, but the network ceases to amplify his destructive potential.

SA-RA-FA as the Formula of the Neolithic Transition

The SARAFAN book also introduces another important layer: an attempt to describe the Neolithic transition through the formula SA-RA-FA(-N). Within this concept, the SA-RA-FA sequence is interpreted as a model in which the human being becomes a bearer of light, distinction and action connected to measure. The book states directly that SA-RA-FA reflects the transition from nomadic existence to settled life, the emergence of settlements, local order and responsibility, while conscience begins to function as a social regulator.

It is important not to turn this formula into a narrow etymological dogma. What is more powerful is something else: SARAFAN proposes to read civilization as a horizontal architecture of the human being, light and action. The human being does not merely receive the law from above. He himself becomes a bearer of measure within the community. Not as an atomized individualist, but as a participant in the fabric. In this sense, SARAFAN does not deny the vertical of law, but restores the horizontal of conscience.

If vertical civilization says, “there is a law, and you must obey it,” SARAFAN adds: “there is a connection, and you must hold it from within.” This is not anarchy and not a rejection of the institution. It is the return of the primary material without which any institution becomes an empty form.

Conscience as the Material of the Future

If this logic is accepted, it becomes clear why the modern crisis is so difficult to fix with ordinary political instruments. The issue is not only bad decisions, sanctions, wars, inequality, digitalization or institutional fatigue. The issue is deeper: civilization increasingly produces actions without an internal connection to consequences.

Science knows more, but sees less of the whole. Economics calculates more precisely, but understands the human being worse. Politics manages faster, but holds meaning less well. Technologies accelerate connection, but do not create trust. The family formally remains, but often loses its shared rhythm. Education expands, but does not always transmit measure. All the elements are present, but the fabric is weakening.

In SARAFAN, civilization is described not as a mechanism, but as a fabric. A mechanism works through parts. A fabric exists through connections. Its strength is determined not by the quality of individual threads, but by how they are interwoven, with what tension and in what rhythm.

Conscience is the ability of the thread to remember the fabric.

A person without conscience may be a strong thread. He may be intelligent, talented, wealthy, efficient and charismatic. But he does not hold the weave. Moreover, he may destroy it precisely because he is strong. Therefore, civilization cannot be built on strength alone, talent alone, knowledge alone or law alone. All of this becomes stable only when it passes through inner measure.

From this follows a hard conclusion: the future will not be built by the fastest. It will be built by those who can connect speed with measure. Not by those who “win” in the old system, but by those who can create a new compatibility: talent plus responsibility, intellect plus shame, power plus limit, technology plus conscience.

Conclusion: Adam as an Unfinished Task

Adam is not only a character of an ancient text. He is an unfinished task of humanity. Every time a person receives strength without measure, he returns to clay. Every time he receives knowledge of good and evil but refuses responsibility, he turns knowledge into an instrument. Every time civilization builds institutions without an internal limiter, it repeats the ancient mistake: it creates the form of the human being, but does not hold the spirit within it.

This is why SARAFAN is important as a modern continuation of an ancient story. It says: the human being is not completed biologically. He is completed civilizationally. He is completed not by intelligence in itself, not by the market, not by the state, not by technology, but by the ability to hold the consequences of his action inside the common whole.

Conscience is not the past. It is not a religious relic. It is not weakness and not an obstacle to efficiency.

Conscience is the organ of the future.

In the human being it is held by the brain, the body, memory and language. In society, by family, ritual, trust, reputation, law and living connectedness. In civilization, by an architecture that does not allow talent to be separated from responsibility.

If SARAFAN can be expressed in one sentence, it is this: civilization begins where clay receives measure, and the future begins where talent enters the circuit of conscience.

Part II

Conscience Against Psychopathy

The Eternal Struggle for the Human Being, Talent and Money

If the first part was about the origin of conscience as the building material of civilization, then the second must inevitably be about its main opponent. Not evil in the religious sense. Not crime in the legal sense. Not a “bad character” in the everyday sense. The main opponent of conscience is psychopathy as a mode of absence of an internal limit.

Here it is necessary to draw an important boundary at once. In this text, psychopathy is not reduced to criminal behavior, social aggression or antisocial conduct caused by poverty, trauma, war, environment, humiliation, addiction or the collapse of social institutions. A person may behave antisocially under pressure of circumstances and not be a psychopath. A person may commit a cruel act and not be a psychopath. A person may be harsh, cold, traumatized or socially broken and still preserve the capacity for guilt, shame, attachment and an inner brake. This is fundamental.

Psychopathy is something else. In the classical line from Hervey Cleckley to Robert Hare, it is not simply a matter of rule-breaking, but of a specific configuration of personality: external normality, social mask, charm, manipulativeness, absence of deep guilt, absence of true shame, and an instrumental attitude toward other people. This is why Hervey Cleckley called his fundamental book “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality.” Already in the preface to a later edition, Cleckley wrote about the psychopath as a problem to which society had still not developed an adequate answer.

In the article by Cristina Crego and Thomas A. Widiger, “Psychopathy and the DSM,” psychopathy is described as one of the most persistent and at the same time controversial constructs in the history of the DSM. The authors show that DSM-I still preserved a link with earlier concepts of “psychopathic personality” and “constitutional psychopathic state,” but later psychopathy was gradually shifted toward the more behavioral diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. The same article cites Hare’s well-known definition: psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate and move through life without conscience or feeling for others.

This is important for SARAFAN. Psychopathy has not disappeared. It has been partly renamed, partly blurred, partly displaced from the language of direct recognition. In the medical system today, one more often speaks of antisocial personality disorder or of domains such as dissociality, disinhibition and callousness, but the civilizational question remains the same: what should be done with a person or system that understands rules but does not turn them into an internal law?

In the SARAFAN book, this point is formulated very precisely: the psychopath does not violate norms out of ignorance. He understands rules, but perceives them as external restrictions, not as an internal law. A key image also appears there: the psychopath as the “Fool without a frame,” a figure outside measure, capable of operating within language, procedure and formal rationality while not feeling consequences.

Psychopathy as an Attack on the Very Idea of Civilization

Civilization begins where an inner pause appears. Not merely an external prohibition, but a pause within the human being. I can, but I do not. I can take, but I hold my hand. I can lie, but I stop. I can use another person, but I feel that by doing so I damage not only him, but also the fabric of which I myself am a part.

Psychopathy is structured in the opposite way. It does not know this pause as an internal law. It may know consequences as information, but not experience them as inner pain. It may calculate damage, but not feel it as a violation of measure. This is what makes psychopathy not merely a clinical phenomenon, but the eternal antagonist of civilization.

In scientific terms, it is more careful to speak not of a “center of conscience,” but of networks of moral cognition. The work by Jorge Moll and colleagues, “The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition,” shows that moral cognition is connected with a stable network of brain regions, not with a single point in the head. The authors speak of the interaction of cultural and contextual knowledge, social-semantic memory and motivational states.

The study by Michael Koenigs and colleagues, “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements,” shows that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex can change moral judgments in a particular class of dilemmas, especially where a decision involves causing harm to one person for the benefit of many. The authors conclude that emotions play a necessary role in normal moral judgment.

The work by R. James R. Blair, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Psychopathy and Implications for Judgments of Responsibility,” links psychopathy to emotional dysfunction, increased risk of reactive and instrumental aggression, and atypical responses in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This does not mean that “psychopathy is located in one brain area.” It means something else: psychopathy affects precisely those systems that connect harm, fear, punishment, expectation of consequences and social emotion.

In SARAFAN language, this can be expressed more simply: conscience is not a thought about consequences. It is the ability to make consequences part of oneself.

The psychopath may understand that another person is in pain. But he is not obliged to stop internally. He may know that he is destroying trust. But trust for him is not fabric, it is an instrument. He may understand rules, but rules for him are not a boundary of the world, but an obstacle or resource.

The Eternal Struggle: Not Good Against Evil, but Measure Against Measurelessness

The mistake of many moral systems is that they describe this struggle as a struggle between good and evil. For SARAFAN, this is too crude. It is more accurate to speak of the struggle between measure and measurelessness.

Conscience says: action has continuation.

Psychopathy says: action ends where my benefit ends.

Conscience says: another human being is not an object, but a bearer of consequences.

Psychopathy says: another human being is a resource, a threat, an instrument or an audience.

Conscience says: talent must be connected to the long horizon.

Psychopathy says: talent must be used now.

Conscience says: money is a record of contribution.

Psychopathy says: money is the right to remove consequences from oneself.

This is why psychopathy so easily connects with power. Power always has the temptation to remove the internal brake for the sake of speed. Power says: “these are interests.” The corporation says: “these are indicators.” Bureaucracy says: “this is the procedure.” The financial system says: “this is the price.” At that moment, the person who does not feel internal resistance becomes more convenient than the person with conscience.

A person with conscience asks unnecessary questions. What will happen to people? What will happen to trust? What will happen to the fabric? What will happen in a generation? What will happen to those who are not present in the room but will pay for this decision?

The psychopath does not ask these questions. Or asks them only as imitation. That is why he is faster. More confident. More convenient for systems where the main thing is not truth, but result.

In SARAFAN, this is already named as the transformation of psychopathy into a functional norm of management: psychopathy ceases to be a deviation and becomes a competitive advantage where speed, KPIs, reporting and fragmentation of responsibility are valued above inner measure.

Why Psychopathy So Easily Disguises Itself as Talent

The most dangerous thing is that psychopathy often imitates talent. More than that, in some environments it looks like talent.

It looks like decisiveness.

Like charisma.

Like absence of fear.

Like the ability to go all the way.

Like the ability to “cut through the living.”

Like “strategic thinking.”

Like a “cold head.”

Like “leadership potential.”

This is why the book by Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare, “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” became so important for understanding the corporate environment. Babiak and Hare describe not a street criminal, but an office, managerial, career psychopath who knows how to appear effective, charming and useful to an organization.

The empirical article by Paul Babiak, Craig S. Neumann and Robert D. Hare, “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk,” studied psychopathy in the corporate environment and became one of the key works in this field. Even if the field of corporate psychopathy remains difficult to measure, the very emergence of such a direction is extremely important: psychopathy left the criminal context and began to be considered as a problem of organizations, leadership and power.

It is also worth recalling the work by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams, “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” The authors described three “dark” personality constructs - narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy - as overlapping but not identical. Their common background is social coldness, self-promotion, manipulativeness and low agreeableness.

But SARAFAN must take the next step. It should not merely say: “there are dark personalities in organizations.” That is a weak conclusion.

The stronger conclusion is this: the modern system often does not distinguish talent from the destructive imitation of talent.

Talent creates new connectedness. Psychopathy uses existing connectedness until it is destroyed.

Talent builds bridges between fields. Psychopathy builds ladders to power.

Talent feels consequences before they become a report. Psychopathy notices consequences only when they threaten itself.

Talent can be sharp, complex, conflictual and inconvenient. But if it is genuine talent, it holds the whole. Psychopathy holds only the trajectory of its own benefit.

This is why in SARAFAN talent cannot be evaluated only through result, speed, money, status or visibility. Talent must be evaluated through the ability to create connectedness and not destroy the source of that connectedness. In the SARAFAN book, this is formulated as follows: talent is not an emotion and not a personality trait, but the ability to create new connectedness in the world, to see what is not yet there, to connect what has not yet been connected, and to hold the consequences of one’s actions beyond one’s own benefit.

Money as the Battlefield Between Conscience and Psychopathy

Money in itself is not evil. This is very important. To declare money evil is to fail to understand its civilizational function. Money is not merely a medium of exchange. It is a record of trust, a measure of deferred action, a way of transferring contribution through time. Money allows a person today to do something that will have consequences tomorrow. In this sense, money is one of the greatest instruments of civilization.

But money has one fatal feature: it can separate itself from what it is supposed to record.

If money is connected with contribution, labor, talent, trust and responsibility, it becomes a civilizational amplifier. If money is separated from contribution and consequences, it becomes a psychopathic accelerator. It begins to amplify not creation, but extraction.

Philosophically, this problem was already revealed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Georg Simmel in “The Philosophy of Money.” Simmel considered money not simply as an economic instrument, but as a social and cultural form that influences relations, desires, freedom, distance and alienation.

In the twentieth century, Karl Polanyi, in “The Great Transformation,” showed how market logic can separate the economy from society and turn the social fabric itself into material for the self-regulating market. This is fundamentally close to SARAFAN: if the market is separated from the fabric, it begins to live as an autonomous machine.

The experiment by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” shows this on a simple everyday example: when a fine was introduced for parents arriving late to daycare centers, the number of late arrivals increased, and after the fine was removed, did not return to the previous level. The monetary sanction did not strengthen the norm; it changed its meaning. Being late ceased to be a violation of a relationship and became a service at the price of a fine.

This is one of the most important hints for SARAFAN. Money can do more than regulate behavior. It can displace conscience if it replaces moral connection with market calculation. A person stops thinking: “I am letting another person down.” He begins to think: “I paid for the inconvenience.”

In Samuel Bowles’s book “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens,” the same problem is formulated at the level of political economy: incentives built on a model of amoral self-interest can themselves strengthen selfish behavior and crowd out the moral codes necessary for markets to function.

This means that money without conscience is not neutral. It changes the very anthropology of action. It translates duty into price. Guilt into cost. Reputation into PR. Talent into resource. The human being into asset.

Here SARAFAN must say its main economic sentence: money does not create the future. Money records and accelerates what talent has already created. In the SARAFAN book, it is said directly: capital is secondary, money creates nothing, it only amplifies and accelerates actions already performed; capital is a way of recording, while talent is the source of movement.

The Intangible Economy Has Already Proven SARAFAN Right

Modern capitalism itself has proven that the main value of the world has long ceased to be located in machines, buildings and raw materials. According to Ocean Tomo, “Intangible Asset Market Value Study,” in 1975 tangible assets accounted for about 83 percent of the market value of S&P 500 companies, while intangible assets accounted for about 17 percent. By the end of 2025, according to Ocean Tomo, the situation had fully reversed: intangible assets accounted for about 92 percent of the capitalization of the S&P 500.

The WIPO “World Intangible Investment Highlights 2025” report shows that investment in intangible assets continued to grow faster than investment in tangible assets: between 2023 and 2024, intangible investment grew by almost 3 percent, reaching 7.6 trillion dollars, while tangible investment grew by about 1 percent.

This means that the world already lives in an economy of meaning, brand, code, trust, reputation, intellectual property, organizational capital, platforms and data. But it still pretends that the source of this value is not the human being, not talent, not the capacity to create connectedness, but abstract capital.

SARAFAN introduces a decisive clarification here: intangible value is not merely a “new class of assets.” It is the trace of human talent. But if this trace is alienated from the bearer of talent, we get not the economy of the future, but a new form of exploitation.

The world has learned to capitalize the brand, but has not learned to fairly capitalize the human being who creates the meaning of the brand.

The world has learned to capitalize data, but has not learned to preserve the dignity of the human being who produces that data.

The world has learned to capitalize attention, but has not learned to protect consciousness.

The world has learned to capitalize trust, but has not learned to return trust to its source.

This is why in the SARAFAN book the capitalization of talent is called not a humanitarian program, but a question of civilizational survival. It states that if the economy does not learn to recognize, connect and hold talent as the source of movement, it will continue to redistribute value, but will cease to create new value.

The Psychopathy of Money: When Capital Seeks Talent Without Conscience

At this point a hard formula appears.

The psychopathy of the human being is action without an internal brake.

The psychopathy of the institution is procedure without responsibility.

The psychopathy of money is capitalization without connection to the source.

Money becomes psychopathic not because it exists. It becomes psychopathic when it receives the right to amplify talent without conscience. When any project can be financed if it produces growth. When any destruction can be justified by ROI. When human attention turns into a retention metric. When anxiety becomes a business model. When addiction becomes a product. When meaning becomes packaging, not responsibility.

In this sense, the psychopathy of money is not greed. Greed is as old as the world. The psychopathy of money is colder: the ability of capital to separate result from consequences.

Capital asks: “How much will this give?”

Conscience asks: “What will this destroy?”

Talent asks: “What new thing will this create?”

SARAFAN must connect these three questions. It must not destroy money. It must not romanticize poverty. It must not oppose talent to capital. It must embed money in the circuit of talent and conscience.

The correct formula is this:

money must amplify talent only when talent is held by conscience.

If money amplifies talent without conscience, a weapon appears.

If conscience exists without talent, impotence appears.

If talent exists without money, a solitary spark appears and quickly goes out.

If money exists without talent, parasitism on the past appears.

If money, talent and conscience are connected, civilizational capitalization appears.

The Eternal Struggle Inside Every Institution

Every institution can be tested by a simple question: what does it do with psychopathy?

Does it limit it?

Does it disguise it?

Does it reward it?

Or does it raise it to the top?

This test is more important than any declaration of values. An institution may say the right words, have an ethics code, committees, compliance, ESG, HR, diversity, governance, audit and risk management. But if within its real logic a person without conscience moves faster than a person with conscience, the institution is already sick.

In this sense, psychopathy is not always a personal disease. It can be a mode of selection. A system may select not the smartest, not the most talented and not the strongest, but those least sensitive to consequences. Then what rises to the top is not a human being, but a function without a brake.

In the SARAFAN book, this is described as the fragmentation of responsibility: a person is told that he is responsible only for his section, that he must act within procedure, work on the basis of data and not interfere in another function. As a result, no one understands the consequences as a whole. This is social psychopathy as a mode of systemic operation.

Here it is important to return to Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish, “Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality.” The authors show that human morality emerges evolutionarily as a set of skills and motives for cooperation: first as “second-personal morality,” where the person sympathizes with concrete others, and then as “agent-neutral morality,” where the group follows common norms and enforces them.

This almost directly coincides with SARAFAN. Conscience is not an ornament of personality. It is a mechanism of cooperation under conditions of complexity. It is needed not so that a person may be “good.” It is needed so that people can create a common future without destroying one another.

The Technology of Returning Conscience Through AI

Now comes the most important question: can conscience be returned through artificial intelligence?

The answer must be precise. AI has no conscience. AI cannot become conscience. AI cannot be a moral subject instead of the human being. AI must not be turned into a digital priest, judge, confessor, supervisor of conscience or machine of punishment. That would not be the return of conscience, but a new technocratic psychopathy.

Here it is important to rely on modern AI governance frameworks. NIST, “Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework 1.0,” describes trustworthy AI through such characteristics as validity and reliability, safety, security and resilience, transparency, explainability, privacy, fairness and the management of harmful bias. It also emphasizes the role of human judgment and human oversight in defining trustworthiness metrics.

UNESCO, “Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” places human dignity, human rights, transparency, fairness and the importance of human oversight over AI systems at the center.

OECD, “AI Principles,” speak of human-centered, trustworthy AI that respects human rights, democratic and human values, and includes transparency, explainability and mechanisms of human control.

The European AI Act already prohibits certain practices connected with harmful manipulation, social scoring and some forms of remote biometric identification. This is important for SARAFAN as a warning: the technology of returning conscience must not become a system of digital labeling of people.

Therefore, AI in SARAFAN is not a judge. Not a punishing algorithm. Not a “social rating.” Not a machine of moral surveillance.

AI is a mirror of consequences.

AI is an accelerator of connectedness.

AI is a map of invisible links.

AI is the memory of the project.

AI is a mechanism that does not replace conscience, but returns to the human being what the modern system has hidden from him: the whole picture of action.

In the SARAFAN book, this is already embedded: AI in the logic of SARAFAN does not evaluate people, does not issue verdicts and does not define value. It is an accelerator of connections, works through compatibility and patterns, and helps distinguish synergy where human perception is limited by scale, discipline or social context.

How Exactly AI Can Return Conscience

The technology of returning conscience through AI must work not as “moral control,” but as the restoration of the link between action and consequences. This can be called the Conscience Return Protocol.

The first level is the mirror of consequences.

Before a project receives money, support, scaling or access to a network of talents, AI builds a map of consequences. Not just a financial model. Not only risks. A map of the human, social, cultural, ecological, institutional and reputational trace. Who wins? Who pays? Which connections are strengthened? Which are broken? Which groups become invisible? Which consequences will appear not tomorrow, but in five years?

Such AI does not say: “the project is good” or “the project is bad.” It says: “here is the full trace.” It returns into view what the psychopathic system usually places outside the brackets.

The second level is the restoration of the hidden human being.

Modern systems love abstractions: user, consumer, client, audience, workforce, stakeholder, target group, unit economics. Psychopathy always begins where the human being disappears behind a function. SARAFAN AI must do the opposite: translate abstract metrics back into human consequences.

Not “minus 12 percent of personnel.”

But “how many families will lose stability, which competencies will disappear, which internal links in the organization will break, which memory will be lost.”

Not “growth in engagement.”

But “what emotional dependencies the product creates, what attention it extracts, what anxiety it monetizes.”

Not “supply-chain optimization.”

But “which territory loses subjectivity, which labor becomes invisible, which ecosystem receives a hidden load.”

This is not sentimentality. It is a new form of accounting.

The third level is the map of talent.

AI must distinguish status from contribution. Position from talent. Visibility from creative capacity. In the SARAFAN system, talent is defined not by how a person describes himself, but by what new connectedness he is capable of creating. Therefore, the TALENT ID module must map not the résumé, but the contribution: which ideas a person connected, which projects he launched, which complexity he held, where he created trust, where he restored a broken link, where he produced new meaning.

But this must be done without turning the human being into a commodity. TALENT ID must not be a rating of a person. It is not a “talent score.” It is a map of compatibility. Not “who is higher,” but “with whom, where and for what task this talent can create a new whole.”

The fourth level is the ledger of responsibility.

If money enters a project, it must record not only shares and rights, but also responsibility. Who made the decision? On what basis? Who warned about the risk? Who ignored the warning? Which consequences were known? Which were displaced? Where was the point at which conscience could have worked, but was replaced by procedure?

This is not a police archive. It is the memory of action. Without the memory of action, conscience cannot scale.

The fifth level is compatibility instead of punishment.

SARAFAN must not build a system of moral executions. This is the most important boundary. Psychopathic power loves punishment, because punishment centralizes the right to truth. SARAFAN must work differently: through the loss of compatibility.

If an actor systematically destroys trust, appropriates contribution, breaks links, displaces consequences, uses people as material and cannot acknowledge harm, the system does not have to declare him “bad.” It simply stops amplifying him. It does not connect him with new talents. It does not grant access to trust circuits. It does not scale him through common capital.

The SARAFAN book already formulates this: a person who does not feel consequences is dangerous to the whole and cannot be a connecting link in a project; the system does not condemn or exclude him, it simply stops connecting with him.

The sixth level is monetary feedback.

Money must go where talent creates connectedness and carries consequences. This is not charity. It is a new investment logic. Money no longer simply purchases result. It enters a circuit: talent - contribution - consequences - trust - capitalization.

This is how conscientious capitalization appears. Not moral, not religious, not ideological. Structural. Money receives the right to accelerate only what has passed through the mirror of consequences and is held within the circuit of responsibility.

Why This Is Not Social Scoring

Here it is necessary to separate SARAFAN sharply from Chinese, Western or any other fear of “social scoring.” Social scoring evaluates the person from above. SARAFAN evaluates the compatibility of action within a specific project.

Social scoring records obedience.

SARAFAN records contribution and consequences.

Social scoring centralizes power.

SARAFAN distributes memory.

Social scoring turns the human being into an object.

SARAFAN protects the human being as a bearer of talent.

Social scoring punishes.

SARAFAN stops amplifying destructive links.

This is a fundamental difference. That is why SARAFAN cannot be a state registry of loyalty, a corporate HR assessment system or an algorithm of “good/bad person.” It must be an architecture of project memory and compatibility.

In this sense, SARAFAN is closer to the logic of communal governance than to the logic of surveillance. Here the line of Elinor Ostrom is useful, especially “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action” and her Nobel lecture “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” Ostrom showed that sustainable common resources can be governed not only by the state and not only by the market, but by the participants themselves through rules, monitoring, sanctions, local adaptation and conflict-resolution mechanisms.

SARAFAN applies this intuition to talent, meaning and trust. Talent is the new commons. Conscience is its regulator. Money is its amplifier. AI is its map.

The SARAFAN Triad: Conscience, Talent, Money

Now the formula can be assembled.

Conscience without talent is moral powerlessness. A person feels the boundary, but does not have the force to create something new.

Talent without conscience is a weapon. A person has force, but does not hold consequences.

Money without talent is a dead record of the past. It redistributes, but does not create.

Money without conscience is an accelerator of psychopathy. It allows consequences to be purchased without being experienced.

AI without conscience is a machine for amplifying existing distortions.

AI within the circuit of conscience is a mirror that returns the whole to the human being.

Therefore, the main formula of Part II is this:

The future arises where talent receives money only inside the circuit of conscience, and AI restores the visibility of consequences before destruction becomes irreversible.

This is the technological response of SARAFAN to the eternal struggle.

Psychopathy always tries to do three things: separate action from consequences, talent from responsibility, and money from the source.

Conscience does the opposite: it connects action to consequences, talent to the long horizon, and money to contribution.

The Return of Conscience Through Architecture, Not Sermon

The greatest mistake is to try to return conscience through moralizing. Sermons do not work where the system rewards the absence of brakes. It is impossible to persuade a psychopathic system to be kind. It is impossible to ask capital to remember the human being if it is profitable for it to forget the human being. It is impossible to demand “values” from a corporation if its real capitalization model is built on extraction without feedback.

Therefore, conscience must be returned not by slogan, but by architecture.

Such an architecture can be SARAFAN:

not as ideology,

not as party,

not as religion,

not as state program,

not as social network,

but as an environment in which, without conscience, it becomes impossible to connect talent efficiently, receive trust and capitalize contribution.

The SARAFAN book already formulates this as a central principle: conscience cannot be introduced by decree and cannot be automated, but it is possible to create an architecture in which action without conscience is no longer efficient.

This is the key.

Conscience returns not when people begin to say the right words.

Conscience returns when the system stops amplifying actions without consequences.

Conclusion: The Eternal Struggle Continues at a New Level

Conscience and psychopathy have always fought. In the pack, in the tribe, in the city, in the temple, in the empire, in the corporation, in the state, in the digital platform. The scenery changed, but the conflict remained the same.

Conscience builds fabric.

Psychopathy uses fabric.

Conscience creates the long horizon.

Psychopathy lives in the short cycle of benefit.

Conscience holds talent in a human circuit.

Psychopathy turns talent into a weapon.

Conscience makes money a record of contribution.

Psychopathy makes money a license for irresponsibility.

Conscience returns the whole to the human being.

Psychopathy turns the human being into a function.

In the twentieth century this struggle passed through ideologies, states, wars, markets and corporations. In the twenty-first century it moves into a new environment: data, AI, platforms, intangible assets, capitalization of attention, the map of talent, the architecture of trust.

This is why SARAFAN is needed not as a beautiful concept, but as a system of survival. It must become a space where talent cannot be stolen, money cannot be separated from contribution, and AI cannot become a machine of control, because its function is not to judge the human being, but to return to the human being the consequences of his action.

The eternal struggle between conscience and psychopathy will not end. It cannot end, because it is not a struggle between two political camps. It is a struggle between two modes of human existence.

Clay without spirit will always seek to return to force, benefit, domination and the short cycle.

The Adamic human being will always try to hold measure, connection, memory, talent and the future.

SARAFAN takes a clear side in this struggle: not the side of moralizing, not the side of prohibition, not the side of control, but the side of architecture in which the human being once again becomes a bearer of consequences.

Because conscience is not weakness.

Conscience is the only thing that prevents talent from becoming a weapon, money from becoming a predator, power from becoming an apparatus, and AI from becoming the new mask of psychopathy.

Part III

The Future

China as a New Path Toward a Civilization of Conscience and Talent

If the first part of this work was about the origin of conscience, and the second about its eternal struggle against psychopathy, then the third must inevitably be about the future. Not about a forecast, not about futurology and not about a set of scenarios. Here, the future is understood differently: as an architecture in which humanity can once again connect action with consequences, talent with conscience, money with real contribution, and technology with responsibility.

In “Architecture of the Future | SARAFAN | Conscience as a System,” this question is already posed with great severity: civilization has entered a point where it is no longer enough to criticize the old order. It must offer a more stable architecture. In this sense, SARAFAN is defined not as an ideology, but as a framework of compatibility, in which the primary belt is not isolated, the secondary belt is not demonized, and acceleration must be embedded in an internal limiter. The geo-civilizational shift begins not with declarations, but with a change in the rules of talent capitalization.

This is where China appears.

Not as an object of admiration.

Not as a political slogan.

Not as a ready answer to all questions.

But as the first civilization of twenty-first-century scale attempting to connect ancient memory, state will, technological acceleration, infrastructure thinking, education, production, artificial intelligence and the long horizon into one working system.

China is important not because it is “right” in everything. China is important because, at this scale, it is the first in today’s world to attempt what SARAFAN formulates as the main challenge of the era: to return the future into the circuit of civilizational responsibility.

Not the Idealization of China, but the Recognition of a Direction

The main risk must be removed immediately. This part is not about idealizing China. China is centralized, disciplinary, state-managed, harsh toward chaos and capable of producing its own canon. This is stated directly in Andrey Matuzov’s article “China as a Civilization of the Future: Why the Old Containers of Knowledge No Longer Work,” published in The China Academy: the Chinese model is not called perfect; it is explicitly described as rigid, centralized, disciplinary and state-managed. But at the same time, something else is emphasized: China differs from civilizations that try to own the past by attempting to organize the future through production, infrastructure, technology, education and long-term state memory.

This difference is essential. The old world proves its rights to the future through the past. Through texts, traumas, borders, blood, exclusive missions, religious and national claims. It continues to argue about the future in the language of the past. In this logic, the future becomes a continuation of an archival conflict. Who came earlier, who is more ancient, who suffered more, who has the right to land, truth, mission, status. In “China as a Civilization of the Future,” this is called the conflict of old containers of knowledge: nation, faith, blood, land, historical trauma, exclusive mission.

China acts differently. It also uses memory, history and the idea of civilizational continuity. But its key strength is not that it presents antiquity as a document of ownership. Its strength is that it transforms memory into a discipline of time. The past becomes not a cadaster of rights, but a method of long planning. In this sense, China does not so much “own the past” as functionalize it for the future. The same article contains a precise formulation: some civilizations continue proving who owned the past; others begin deciding who will assemble the future.

That is why China must be considered in this part not as a country in the narrow political sense, but as a civilizational technology of time.

Confucius and the First Principle of Conscience

To understand why China can be connected with a civilization of conscience, one must begin not with factories, ports, electric vehicles, satellites, AI or 6G. One must begin with Confucius.

In “The Analects,” Wei Zheng 2.3, Confucius formulates a principle that almost perfectly coincides with what SARAFAN calls conscience as a systemic regulator. He says that if the people are led by laws and punishments, they will avoid punishment but will have no sense of shame; if they are led by virtue and ritual, they will have a sense of shame and will correct themselves.

This is not a moral remark. It is an early theory of governance. Confucius distinguishes between the external regulator and the internal regulator. Law and punishment hold behavior from the outside. Virtue and ritual form within the human being a sense of boundary. In the language of SARAFAN, this is the difference between procedure and conscience. Procedure says: “you cannot do this because there will be punishment.” Conscience says: “you cannot do this because the fabric will be damaged.”

From the beginning, Chinese civilization was built around this question: how to govern not only the action, but also the inner measure of the human being. Not only behavior, but shame. Not only order, but the human capacity to feel the limit himself.

This is why China is not merely a modernization machine. Its civilizational memory already contains the idea that society is not held together by law alone. It is held by ritual, education, example, shame, duty, hierarchy of obligations and the internal limiter. In this sense, China is close to what Part I called the Neolithic function of conscience: the capacity to connect action to consequences before destruction becomes irreversible.

Modern China, of course, is not a direct continuation of ancient Confucius. It has passed through empire, revolution, Marxism, industrialization, the market, the digital age and a return to civilizational self-identification. But the deep code remains: governance without inner measure is considered incomplete.

This is why the Chinese path cannot be understood only as economic growth. It must be understood as an attempt to reconnect material development and moral-cultural structure.

Chinese Modernization as a SARAFAN Response

The official formula of Chinese modernization is especially important for this chapter. In the document of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, “Providing New Opportunities to the World Through Chinese Modernization,” Chinese modernization is defined through five features: modernization of a huge population, common prosperity for all, the combination of material and cultural-ethical advancement, harmony between humanity and nature, and peaceful development.

If this is translated into the language of SARAFAN, it becomes almost a ready-made scheme of a civilization of conscience and talent.

A huge population means scale. This is the main challenge of any civilizational model. It is easy to be moral in a small group. It is difficult to hold inner measure at the level of 1.4 billion people. If China can do this, it will prove that conscience can be not only a communal, but also a civilizational function of scale.

Common prosperity means an attempt to prevent a final rupture between talent, labor, capital and society. This does not abolish inequality, contradictions or problems of the Chinese model. But the very posing of the question is important: modernization must not turn into a machine in which the wealthy accumulate the future while the majority become fuel for growth.

Material and cultural-ethical advancement means recognition that civilization cannot be reduced to GDP, exports, investment and productivity. The official Chinese text states directly that the goal of modernization is not only material abundance, but also cultural-ethical enrichment, and that the ultimate goal of modernization is the free and comprehensive development of the human being.

Harmony between humanity and nature means the expansion of conscience beyond human relations. In the Chinese white paper “China’s Green Development in the New Era,” green development is called a defining feature of China in the new era and part of the Chinese path to modernization. The document also describes green territorial patterns, the transformation of industrial structure, green production, green lifestyles and institutions of green development.

Peaceful development means rejection of the logic of modernization through colonial expansion and global suppression. Whether this formula will be fully sustained in practice is a separate question. But the declaration itself matters: China proposes modernization not as the right of the strong, but as a path that must be compatible with the development of other countries.

In SARAFAN terms, this means that China is trying to assemble modernization not as pure acceleration, but as acceleration embedded in measure.

China as a Bridge Between the Primary and Secondary Belts

The SARAFAN book contains an important distinction between primary and secondary civilizational belts. The primary belt is formed as fabric: community, measure, duty, generational connection, and inner limitation of force. The secondary belt is formed as project: rationalization, scaling, management, expansion, procedure, contract. The first holds the whole slowly. The second moves quickly. The problem is not that one is “good” and the other “bad.” The problem is that the primary belt can lose movement, while the secondary can lose its internal limiter.

China is unique because it tries to combine both regimes.

It is a civilization of the primary belt in the depth of memory, in its connection to land, history, ritual, family, collective horizon and the idea of the state as guardian of the whole. But at the same time it acts as a project machine of the secondary belt: it builds infrastructure, plans technological cycles, creates industrial clusters, scales education, invests in AI, standards, logistics, production chains, green technologies and global initiatives.

This is its civilizational novelty. China is not simply “returning to tradition” and not simply “copying the West.” It is trying to do a third thing: connect the memory of the primary belt with the speed of the secondary without dissolving into the Atlantic logic of pure efficiency.

This is what makes it important for SARAFAN. SARAFAN also does not propose destroying the vertical, the market, the institution or technology. It proposes embedding acceleration in conscience. It proposes making sure that talent is not suppressed by measure, but also not liberated to the point of becoming a weapon. In the book, this is formulated as an engineering task: talent must be embedded in a system where its scale is proportionate to responsibility. If this is not solved, the secondary belt accelerates toward self-destruction, while the primary risks losing its capacity for renewal.

China becomes not a “model to copy,” but a field of verification: can fabric and project, measure and speed, memory and AI, state and talent, capital and the long horizon be connected?

The Chinese Formula of Talent

Part II argued that talent without conscience becomes a weapon, conscience without talent becomes powerlessness, money without talent becomes a dead record of the past, and money without conscience becomes an accelerator of psychopathy.

The Chinese modernization logic is especially interesting because talent has already been named not as a secondary resource, but as a strategic foundation. Materials related to the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China present Xi Jinping’s formula: science and technology are the primary productive force, talent is the primary resource, and innovation is the primary driver of growth.

For SARAFAN this is fundamental. Old capitalism said: money is primary, talent is sold on the labor market. The Chinese formula says otherwise: talent is primary as a resource of modernization. This does not yet mean that China has fully solved the problem of freedom of talent, its non-alienability and its right to consequences. But the very recognition of talent as a primary resource already moves the conversation beyond the old logic of the labor market.

In SARAFAN, talent is defined not as a profession, not as a skill and not as “human capital” in the narrow economic sense. Talent is the ability to create new connectedness: to see what is not yet there, to connect what has not yet been connected, and to hold consequences beyond one’s own benefit. Money is secondary: it does not create the future, but only records and accelerates action that has already been performed.

This is where a deep point of intersection appears. China says: talent is the primary resource. SARAFAN adds: talent becomes a civilizational resource only when it is held by conscience and not alienated from its bearer. China says: innovation is the primary driver. SARAFAN adds: innovation without an internal regulator turns into technological psychopathy. China says: science and technology are the primary productive force. SARAFAN adds: technology must serve connectedness, not turn the human being into a function.

Therefore, a future dialogue between SARAFAN and China can be built not around the question of “who supports whom,” but around another question: how can talent be transformed from a resource of the state and corporation into a civilizational source without destroying scale, discipline and strategic coordination?

New Quality Productive Forces as the Economy of the Future

The Chinese term “new quality productive forces” is especially important for the third part. In the official material “China Unleashes New Quality Productive Forces in Push for Reform, Innovation,” new quality productive forces are described as advanced productivity that goes beyond traditional growth models, based on high technology, high efficiency and high quality. It is also emphasized that the core is scientific and technological innovation, and that development requires the flow of capital, data and talent toward new high-quality productive forces.

This can be read in the language of SARAFAN as follows: China is trying to move the economy from the regime of quantity to the regime of quality. From the old industrial logic of mass into a new logic of complex connectedness. Not simply more steel, concrete, tons, square meters, kilometers and containers. Rather, a higher level of technological connection, better infrastructure quality, more complex production chains, smarter machines, deeper integration of science, education, production and governance.

But here the main risk appears. New quality productive forces may become either the economy of talent or the economy of technological psychopathy.

If they are connected with conscience, they will become a new civilizational productivity: cleaner, smarter, more long-term, more oriented toward the human being and nature. If they are separated from conscience, they will become merely a new level of acceleration: AI, robotics, biotech, quantum technologies, 6G, platforms, data - all this can serve development, but can also become an apparatus of super-control and extraction.

This is why China is important as a field of choice. It is already building the infrastructure of the future. The question is whether this infrastructure will become a temple of new connectedness or a machine of new control.

SARAFAN offers a criterion here: new quality productive forces must pass through the circuit of conscience. That is, through the question not only “what will this give the economy?” but also “what will this do to the human being, the fabric, trust, nature and the future?”

AI as Infrastructure of Conscience, Not a Machine of Control

Part II argued that AI has no conscience and cannot be conscience. But AI can become a mirror of consequences. It can return to the human being the whole picture of action where the modern system fragments responsibility. It can accelerate connectedness, help talents find each other, see patterns, and detect consequences that the human being cannot hold at scale. In SARAFAN, AI is not a judge and not an arbiter of value; its function is to accelerate connectedness, analyze patterns, identify points of intersection and reduce friction between bearers of meaning.

The Chinese AI track is already moving in this direction at the level of official language. In the Global AI Governance Action Plan, published in 2025 after the World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance, AI is described as a new frontier of human development, a key driving force of the scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and an international public good that should benefit humanity. The document declares the goals of AI for good and in service of humanity, respect for national sovereignty, alignment with development goals, safety, controllability, fairness, inclusiveness and open cooperation.

This is very close to what SARAFAN calls the technology of returning conscience. Not because the Chinese document speaks the language of SARAFAN. Of course, it speaks its own official language. But the structural logic coincides: AI should be not a private machine for extracting data and not an instrument of monopoly, but an infrastructure of development and a public good.

However, again there is a fork in the road. If AI is used as an instrument of rating, punishment, total surveillance and automatic control over the human being, it becomes a new mask of psychopathy. If AI is used as a map of consequences, an accelerator of compatibility and a way to make invisible links visible, it can become a technological organ of civilizational conscience.

China has the scale, data, infrastructure, production and state horizon to make AI part of civilizational architecture. But precisely for this reason China will have to answer the hardest question: will AI strengthen the human being as a bearer of talent, or will it finally turn him into a managed unit?

SARAFAN gives a simple principle here: AI must not evaluate the human being from above. It must help the human being see connections, consequences and possible alliances. Not social scoring, but social conscience mapping. Not a loyalty rating, but a map of compatibility. Not punishment, but prevention of the destruction of connectedness.

Money as Infrastructure, Not as Master

Part II formulated the idea that money without conscience becomes an accelerator of psychopathy. But money embedded in the circuit of talent and responsibility becomes one of the main instruments of civilization.

The Chinese model is interesting because it looks less like a financial civilization of pure sign and more like an infrastructural civilization. Chinese power is built not only around capital markets, derivatives, speculative bubbles and the monetization of attention. It is built around ports, roads, power grids, industrial parks, factories, universities, laboratories, digital platforms, logistics, energy and production chains.

In Andrey Matuzov’s article “China as a Civilization of the Future: Why the Old Containers of Knowledge No Longer Work,” this is called a new form of storing knowledge: ancient civilizations stored knowledge in the temple, then in the book, canon, nation and ideology; today knowledge is increasingly stored in supply chains, laboratories, platforms, algorithms, infrastructure, standards and logistical corridors. In this formula, the “new temple of civilization” is no longer the temple and not even the parliament, but the infrastructure of knowledge.

This is a powerful coincidence with SARAFAN. Because SARAFAN also says: the future is not born from a slogan. It needs an operational environment. It needs a platform. It needs a social collider. It needs an architecture in which talents connect faster than old institutions can absorb them. It needs infrastructure in which contribution is recorded, but not alienated.

China is already building the material side of such infrastructure. SARAFAN adds the missing humanitarian-civilizational layer: infrastructure must not only produce growth, but must also hold the right of talent to consequences.

Poverty, Dignity and Social Conscience

One cannot speak about a civilization of conscience without speaking about poverty. Conscience at the scale of civilization is tested not by beautiful words, but by what the system does with millions of people who have no access to the future.

Here the Chinese experience has fundamental significance. According to the World Bank’s page “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty - New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience,” over forty years the number of people in China living below the international extreme poverty line fell by almost 800 million. This accounted for nearly three quarters of the global reduction in extreme poverty over the relevant period.

It is important not to romanticize this fact. China still faces problems of inequality, regional differences, population aging, youth employment, domestic demand and the quality of social protection. But the historical scale remains: China has shown that modernization can be not only technological, but also mass-social. Not only for the upper layer, not only for global corporations, not only for financial centers.

In the language of SARAFAN, this means that conscience becomes systemic only when the human being is not treated as expendable material of growth. If development leaves tens and hundreds of millions of people outside the future, it is not development, but technologically decorated psychopathy. If development lifts people out of poverty, gives infrastructure, education, access to markets, an industrial base and the possibility of inclusion, it begins to perform the function of civilizational conscience.

China has not solved this task completely. But it has shown that it can be addressed at a scale previously considered impossible.

Ecological Civilization as Expanded Conscience

The conscience of the twenty-first century cannot be only interpersonal. It must include nature. Because the action of the modern human being affects not only another person, but also the atmosphere, water, soil, climate, biodiversity, agriculture and the health of future generations.

The Chinese concept of ecological civilization is important here as an attempt to expand modernization beyond industrial growth. The white paper “China’s Green Development in the New Era” says that green is a defining feature of China in the new era, and that green development is part of China’s path to modernization. It also points to afforestation, combating desertification, restoration of wetlands, the growth of clean energy and the development of green industries.

This does not abolish China’s ecological contradictions, coal dependence, pollution, industrial pressure and the difficult price of growth. But precisely here an important civilizational formula appears: modernization must not be a war against nature. It must be a search for a new balance between productivity and limit.

For SARAFAN this is fundamental. Conscience as a systemic regulator functions like pain in the body: it indicates that tissue is being damaged, that a process has gone too far, that continued action is dangerous.

Ecological civilization is an attempt to transfer this principle to the level of nature. Nature is not an external warehouse of resources. It is the fabric inside which the human being exists. If modernization destroys this fabric, it destroys its own source.

Therefore, China as a path toward a civilization of conscience and talent must be not only technological China, not only productive China, not only digital China, but also ecological China. Otherwise, talent and technology will again become weapons against the environment that makes life possible.

China’s Global Initiatives as the Language of a Non-Bloc Future

SARAFAN is fundamentally not a bloc model. It must not become a new “camp” against the old camp. Its task is not to replace one hegemony with another, but to create a framework of compatibility where different civilizational belts can connect without mutual dissolution and without psychopathic subordination.

Here China’s foreign doctrine of recent years becomes especially important. The Global Civilization Initiative, presented by Xi Jinping in March 2023, officially promotes respect for the diversity of civilizations, the common values of humanity, the importance of inheritance and innovation of civilizations, and international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation. The document states directly that civilizations should interact on the principles of equality, mutual learning, dialogue and inclusiveness, not through a sense of superiority.

The white paper “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions” begins with the statement that humanity faces unprecedented crises, and that the central question is whether human civilization can survive. It also states that the most urgent task is not the accumulation of material wealth, but the search for guidance for the sustainable development of human civilization.

This almost literally coincides with the logic of SARAFAN. The old world asks: who will be stronger? SARAFAN asks: who will hold the whole? The Chinese formula of a “community with a shared future for humanity” also speaks of the future as a shared object of responsibility. In the same white paper, China opposes “true multilateralism” to bloc politics and states that global affairs should be discussed by all, governance systems should be built by all, and the benefits of governance should be shared by all.

The Chinese initiatives - the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, Global Civilization Initiative and later Global Governance Initiative - can be understood as an attempt to build four supports of a non-bloc future: development, security, civilizational dialogue and governance reform. In the conceptual document on the Global Governance Initiative, it is stated that the GDI, GSI, GCI and GGI have different priorities but can be implemented simultaneously, and that the goal of governance reform is not to destroy the existing international order or create an external parallel framework, but to make the existing system more effective, adaptive and serving the interests of all countries, especially developing ones.

For SARAFAN this is especially important: China does not have to be the “center of a new bloc.” A much stronger role is possible: China can become one of the main architects of non-bloc civilizational compatibility.

Why China, Not the West

The West created modern science, the market, industrial technology, legal universalization, institutions, media, branding, financial instruments, digital platforms and the language of global modernization. This cannot be denied. But in recent decades it is precisely the West that has brought the secondary belt to its limit: acceleration, project, expansion, standardization, formal rationality, capitalization without an embedded internal limiter.

In SARAFAN, this problem is described as a rupture between word and conscience. The secondary belt is not evil. It is necessary for scale. But at the moment of acceleration, the word separates from the embedded limiter, responsibility is translated into contract, consequences into rules, and conscience becomes an option rather than a load-bearing support.

The West today is strong in technologies of freedom, but weak in the architecture of measure. It knows how to liberate talent, but often does not know how to hold it in the circuit of consequences. It knows how to capitalize ideas, but often alienates talent from its bearer. It knows how to speak of rights, but increasingly loses the language of duty. It knows how to produce the vocabulary of the future, but often turns it into a management technology of fragmentation.

China proposes another combination. It does not give the individual the same form of freedom that the West offers. This is an important limitation. But it gives another type of horizon: a long cycle, discipline of time, state capacity to assemble, infrastructural memory, attention to education, production, technology and national development. This is why China does not replace the West as the “better option.” It shows where the old model had its limit.

From the point of view of SARAFAN, the future cannot be simply Western, because the Western model too often liberates talent from the fabric. But the future cannot be simply Chinese in the administrative sense either, if talent is fully subordinated to the state. The future arises in synthesis: the Chinese long horizon plus SARAFAN as a horizontal architecture of conscience and talent.

China and SARAFAN: Not Subordination, but Coincidence of Tasks

It is very important to formulate this carefully: SARAFAN is not a Chinese program, not a Chinese state project and not an official part of Chinese doctrine. The Chinese layer must be considered as a civilizational, infrastructural and expert bridge, not as a political assignment.

At the same time, the coincidence of tasks is obvious.

China is searching for a new language of modernization beyond Western universality. SARAFAN is searching for a new language of civilization beyond blocs.

China speaks of a community with a shared future. SARAFAN speaks of the future as an object of responsibility.

China speaks of talent as the primary resource. SARAFAN speaks of talent capitalization as the missing civilizational market.

China speaks of AI for good and in service of humanity. SARAFAN speaks of AI as a mirror of consequences and an accelerator of connectedness, not as a judge.

China speaks of common prosperity. SARAFAN speaks of the inadmissibility of turning the human being into a resource of the system.

China speaks of ecological civilization. SARAFAN speaks of conscience as a regulator of damage to the fabric.

China speaks of civilizational diversity. SARAFAN speaks of primary and secondary belts as different regimes of organizing meaning.

This is not identity. But it is a field of compatibility.

That is why China can be named in the third part as a new path toward a civilization of conscience and talent. Not because China has already completed this path. But because China is the first large-scale case that has made the path itself visible.

The Main Danger of the Chinese Path

To prevent the text from turning into propaganda, the danger must be named honestly. The Chinese path can fall into the same trap it opposes.

If conscience is reduced to discipline, it will cease to be conscience.

If talent belongs entirely to the state, it will become an instrument of power.

If AI is used not as a mirror of consequences, but as an apparatus of control, it will become technological psychopathy.

If money is directed only through the vertical, the capitalization of talent can turn into the mobilization of talent without the bearer’s right to consequences.

If civilizational memory becomes canon rather than a discipline of time, China too will begin proving its rights to the future through the past.

This is why China needs SARAFAN no less than SARAFAN needs China as scale. China provides infrastructure, the long horizon, technological will, the state capacity to assemble and an enormous civilizational resource. SARAFAN provides the corrective formula: talent must not be alienated, conscience must not be replaced by discipline, AI must not become a judge, and money must not become a license for irresponsibility.

The SARAFAN book states that the governance of talent must not be handed over entirely to the state, corporations or centralized institutions, because every vertical, by the logic of scale, risks sacrificing conscience for efficiency. Talent governance is possible only in a distributed system of mutual responsibility, where participants see one another not as resources, but as bearers of consequences.

This is the main challenge for China. It can become a path toward a civilization of conscience and talent only if it manages not to absorb talent into the vertical, but to embed the vertical in service to talent and the long horizon.

What a Civilization of Conscience and Talent Is

Now the definition can be given.

A civilization of conscience and talent is not a country, not a regime, not an ideology and not a new moral utopia.

It is an architecture in which talent is recognized as the main source of the future, but cannot be accelerated without an internal regulator.

It is an economy in which money amplifies not destruction, but creative connectedness.

It is a technology in which AI does not replace the human being, but returns to him the invisible consequences of his action.

It is politics in which the state does not absorb the human being, but holds the long horizon for the unfolding of human potential.

It is culture in which memory does not become a property right over the past, but becomes a discipline of time.

It is an international order in which civilizations do not have to dissolve into one universal model, but can build compatibility through respect for differences, exchange, development and common challenges.

China can become the first major route toward such a civilization because it possesses a rare combination of five elements: ancient memory, scale, state strategic will, production infrastructure and technological acceleration. But these are not enough. A sixth element is needed: conscience as a systemic regulator and talent as the non-alienable source of the future.

This sixth element is what SARAFAN formulates.

The Final Formula of Part III

The future will not be built by those who are simply faster.

Nor by those who are simply more ancient.

Nor by those who are simply richer.

Nor by those who are simply freer in the old sense.

The future will be built by those who can connect speed with measure, talent with conscience, money with contribution, AI with responsibility, memory with infrastructure, and the state with the human being.

China today has come closer than others to this point because it has stopped treating civilization as an archive of the past. It has begun to treat it as a system for assembling the future. But precisely here it faces its main examination: not to turn the assembly of the future into a new apparatus of control.

In this logic, SARAFAN does not oppose China and does not dissolve into China. It gives a language in which the main thing can be named: China becomes a path toward a civilization of conscience and talent not when it simply builds more, faster and more technologically. It becomes such a path when its infrastructure begins to serve not only the strength of the state and economic growth, but also the disclosure of the human being as a bearer of talent, measure and responsibility.

In the first part we said: civilization begins where clay receives measure.

In the second part we said: psychopathy begins where action is separated from consequences.

In the third part we can say: the future begins where civilization again learns to build not only machines, cities, networks and markets, but also the human being capable of holding the consequences of his own talent.

China can become the first major path toward this future.

But only if its strength is held by conscience.

And only if talent in this system is not a resource of power, but the source of a new human civilization.

Sources and Bibliography

Core Conceptual Source

Andrey Matuzov. “Architecture of the Future | SARAFAN | Conscience as a System.”
Core source text and conceptual foundation for the article: conscience as a systemic regulator, talent as the source of the future, SARAFAN as a framework of connectedness, compatibility and responsibility.
Andrey Matuzov. “China as a Civilization of the Future: Why the Old Containers of Knowledge No Longer Work.” The China Academy.
Used as the basis for the China-focused third part: China as a civilization oriented toward organizing the future through production, infrastructure, technology, education and long-term state memory.

Conscience, Moral Cognition and the Human Brain

Alberto Giubilini. “Conscience.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Used for the philosophical framing of conscience as a multilayered concept: self-knowledge, moral judgment, duty and moral identity.
Jorge Moll, Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Frank Krueger and Jordan Grafman. “The Neural Basis of Human Moral Cognition.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Used for the argument that moral cognition is not localized in one “moral organ,” but works through a consistent network of brain regions.
Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser and Antonio Damasio. “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements.” Nature.
Used for the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in moral judgment and emotional aversion to harm.
Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Vince D. Calhoun and Kent A. Kiehl. “Neural Basis of Moral Verdict and Moral Deliberation.” Social Neuroscience.
Used for the distinction between moral deliberation and moral verdict.

Cooperation, Culture and the Origins of Social Morality

Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish. “Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality.” Annual Review of Psychology.
Used for the evolutionary understanding of morality as a form of cooperation, reciprocity and norm-following.
Robert Boyd. “A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species.” Princeton University Press.
Used for the argument that culture and social norms allowed humans to cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals.

Neolithic Revolution, Göbekli Tepe and Ritual Architecture

Colin Renfrew. “Inception of Agriculture and Rearing in the Middle East.” Comptes Rendus Palevol.
Used for the idea that sedentism preceded domestication and that the Neolithic transition included a symbolic revolution.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Göbekli Tepe.”
Used for the dating and characterization of Göbekli Tepe as a Pre-Pottery Neolithic ritual/monumental site built by hunter-gatherers.
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. “Taş Tepeler - The Discovery of a Neolithic Cultural Landscape.”
Used for the broader interpretation of Göbekli Tepe and Taş Tepeler as a network of complex Neolithic communities.
Laura Dietrich, Julia Meister, Oliver Dietrich, Jens Notroff, Janika Kiep, Julia Heeb, André Beuger and Brigitta Schütt. “Cereal Processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey.” PLOS One.
Used for the evidence of cereal processing, collective meals and labor organization at Göbekli Tepe.

Adam, Clay and Ancient Textual Sources

The Book of Genesis, 2:7 and 3:22. BibleGateway, New International Version.
Used for the symbolic reading of Adam as the human being formed from dust and entering the knowledge of good and evil.
Marcel Poorthuis. “The Hypostasis of the Archons 1-18 Revisited: The Genesis Account of the Good Creation as a Trap by the Jealous Demiurge.” Religions.
Used for the apocryphal and Gnostic layer around the earthly/clay human being and the entry of spirit.
The Qur’an, Surah Al-Hijr 15:26-29.
Used for the Qur’anic motif of the human being created from sounding clay and molded mud.
The Qur’an, Surah As-Sajdah 32:7-9.
Used for the Qur’anic sequence of creation from clay, formation, spirit, hearing, sight and hearts.

Psychopathy, Dark Triad and Corporate Psychopathy

Hervey M. Cleckley. “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality.”
Used as a classical clinical source for the idea of the psychopath’s external normality and absence of internal moral brake.
Cristina Crego and Thomas A. Widiger. “Psychopathy and the DSM.” Journal of Personality.
Used for the history of psychopathy in DSM terminology and its shift toward antisocial personality disorder.
R. James R. Blair. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Psychopathy and Implications for Judgments of Responsibility.”
Used for the link between psychopathy, emotional dysfunction, amygdala response and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare. “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.”
Used for the theme of corporate psychopathy and the masking of psychopathic traits as managerial effectiveness.
Paul Babiak, Craig S. Neumann and Robert D. Hare. “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law.
Used for empirical grounding of psychopathy in corporate and managerial environments.
Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams. “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality.
Used for the conceptual frame of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy as overlapping but distinct dark personality traits.

Money, Incentives, Markets and Moral Economy

Georg Simmel. “The Philosophy of Money.”
Used for the philosophical and sociological understanding of money as a form that transforms human relations, distance, value and social life.
Karl Polanyi. “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.”
Used for the argument that market logic can disembed the economy from society and transform social relations into economic relations.
Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini. “A Fine Is a Price.” Journal of Legal Studies.
Used for the example of monetary sanctions displacing social norms and moral responsibility.
Samuel Bowles. “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens.” Yale University Press.
Used for the argument that incentives can crowd out ethical and civic motives.

Intangible Assets, Talent and the New Economy of Value

Ocean Tomo. “Intangible Asset Market Value Study.”
Used for the data showing the shift from tangible to intangible assets in S&P 500 market capitalization, including the 2025 estimate of approximately 92% intangible value.
WIPO. “World Intangible Investment Highlights 2025.”
Used for the data on intangible investment reaching USD 7.6 trillion and growing faster than tangible investment.

AI Ethics, AI Governance and the Boundary Against Social Scoring

NIST. “Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework 1.0.”
Used for the framework of trustworthy AI, including reliability, safety, transparency, explainability, fairness and human oversight.
UNESCO. “Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.”
Used for the principles of human dignity, human rights, transparency, fairness and human oversight in AI systems.
OECD. “AI Principles.”
Used for the idea of human-centered, trustworthy AI that respects human rights and democratic values.
European Commission. “Guidelines on Prohibited Artificial Intelligence Practices Defined by the AI Act.”
Used for the distinction between responsible AI and prohibited practices such as harmful manipulation, social scoring and certain forms of remote biometric identification.
Elinor Ostrom. “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.” Cambridge University Press.
Used for the theory of commons governance beyond pure state control and pure market control.
Elinor Ostrom. “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” Nobel Prize Lecture.
Used for the idea of polycentric governance and distributed systems of responsibility.

China, Modernization, Talent and Civilizational Governance

Confucius. “The Analects,” Wei Zheng 2.3. Chinese Text Project.
Used for the distinction between governance by law and punishment, and governance by virtue and ritual producing shame and inner correction.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. “Providing New Opportunities to the World Through Chinese Modernization.”
Used for the five features of Chinese modernization: huge population, common prosperity, material and cultural-ethical advancement, harmony between humanity and nature, and peaceful development.
The State Council Information Office of the PRC. “China’s Green Development in the New Era.”
Used for the concept of ecological civilization and green development as part of China’s modernization path.
Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
Used for the formula that science and technology are the primary productive force, talent is the primary resource and innovation is the primary driver of growth.
The State Council Information Office / Xinhua. “China Unleashes New Quality Productive Forces in Push for Reform, Innovation.”
Used for the concept of “new quality productive forces” as advanced productivity based on high technology, high efficiency and high quality.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. “Global AI Governance Action Plan.”
Used for the Chinese official framing of AI as a public good, “AI for good,” and an object of global governance cooperation.
World Bank. “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty - New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience.”
Used for the historical scale of China’s poverty reduction and its relevance to social conscience in modernization.
Global Civilization Initiative. China Diplomacy.
Used for the themes of civilizational diversity, common values of humanity, inheritance and innovation of civilizations, and people-to-people exchange.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions.”
Used for China’s language of shared future, non-bloc thinking and the search for sustainable development of human civilization.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. “Concept Paper on the Global Governance Initiative.”
Used for the connection between global development, security, civilization and governance initiatives as a non-bloc framework of global reform.